


Planet of the Dead

by Marcus_S_Lazarus



Series: The Twilight Storm [6]
Category: Doctor Who, Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, Episode: s04e15 Planet of the Dead, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23545945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marcus_S_Lazarus/pseuds/Marcus_S_Lazarus
Summary: The Doctor and Bella team up with Lady Christina and UNIT to save the passengers of a bus that has gone through a wormhole
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Bella Swan
Series: The Twilight Storm [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694503
Kudos: 5





	1. Into the 200

**Author's Note:**

> My "Planet of the Dead" rewrite, beginning shortly after the Doctor and Bella landed as they're following the Doctor's device to track down the wormhole; hope you like it.

As I hurried along after the Doctor as he studied the strange device in his hand- how he had cobbled something like that together so quickly I didn't know, even if I was beginning to realise that, when it came to the Doctor, sometimes you were better off not asking too many questions-, I just wished that we had more time to appreciate our surroundings; London was one of those places that I'd always wanted to visit but never managed to get around to going to, and my brief glimpse of the surroundings so far had only left me all the more eager to see more of them.

I still wasn't entirely clear on _what_ we were looking for, of course- the Doctor had just been studying the TARDIS's console when he suddenly started talking about some kind of particles on Earth that shouldn't be there and ran off to get some kind of box from some other part of the ship-, but right now I was more focused on keeping up with the Doctor as he followed his device to wherever it was leading us; maybe once we got there-

"Hold on!" the Doctor said, practically screeching to a halt as he turned to look at something in a shop window beside us.

"What?" I asked, looking at him in confusion. "Something wrong?"

"No, nothing's _wrong_ ; it's Easter!" the Doctor replied, grinning as he looked back at me while indicating the window; now that I looked, I could see the assorted Easter eggs that had attracted the Doctor's attention. "I love Easter; never really do it as I can't always find it, but since I'm here..."

Before I could stop him, he had passed the device to me, muttered a few quick instructions that I barely managed to follow- something about the sound it would make if it detected what he was looking for- and then hurried into the shop, leaving me to stare in bemusement at the object in my hands. Stuck for alternative things to do, I waved the device around- a strange green box-shaped thing that looked like it had been soldered together from assorted cables and a random keypad, with an odd little dish in the middle and what looked like a clock-face on the top; like the TARDIS console, now that I thought about it, both gave the impression that they'd been rather haphazardly pieced together-, quickly being met with a slight beeping when I aimed the box down the street that we were currently standing on.

"There's something that way-" I began as the Doctor hurried out of the shop, two chocolate eggs wrapped in golden foil in each hand before he passed one to me while taking the box back himself.

"Right then," he said, glancing at the box briefly before he pocketed it and smiled at me. "Enjoy your egg; as you said, what we're looking for seems to be _that_ way, so we'll just have to..."

His smile grew even broader as he noticed something behind me. "Ah; we can take that! Come on!"

I was so busy trying to make sure that I didn't lose my grip on my egg when the Doctor grabbed my other wrist and began to run- I may not have felt in much of a festive spirit since Edward had left me, but I couldn't deny that I always enjoyed the chocolate eggs when the time came, and I didn't want to lose this one- that I initially didn't realise what he was doing, but then I noticed the large red vehicle standing in front of us, and my eyes widened in surprise.

The Doctor was taking me onto a _bus_?

"We're using public transport?" I said, looking at him in surprise even as I hurried to keep up with him. "Isn't that a bit... slow for you?"

"Nah, sometimes slow's good; good to get a hands-on look at the people you're helping, you know," the Doctor clarified, before he hurried up to the door- the bus driver noting that we were just in time as he did so- and pulled out a small black leather wallet, holding it up to the bus ticket machine in his right hand before passing it to his left hand behind his back and doing the same thing as he indicated me.

I didn't even have the chance to ask him what he'd just done before he had taken me over to a seat just behind a young woman with long dark hair dressed in a tight black jacket, smiling at me as he sat down and opened the wrapping around his egg.

"Hello," he said, smiling and nodding briefly at the woman in front of us. "I'm the Doctor, and this is Bella; Happy Easter."

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to smile in amusement or thump my head against the bar in front of me in exasperation at the Doctor's sudden pronouncement; for a man who'd apparently spent a lot of time with humans if his comment about travelling with other people before me was accurate, he seemed to have _very_ little interest in the social graces such as the appropriateness of introductions...

"Funny thing is," the Doctor said, turning his attention back to me after the woman in front of us had simply turned her attention back to the road ahead without replying to the Doctor's attempt to break the ice, "I don't often do Easter, I can never find it, it's always at a different time."

"Yeah..." I said, nodding slightly as he chewed on a piece of his egg. "I... guess that would make it... tricky."

"Although," the Doctor added, as though he'd just remembered what he was about to say, "I remember the original; between you and me, what really happened was -"

I wasn't sure if I was grateful or disappointed when the device he'd been examining earlier beeped in his pocket before he could tell me more; hearing the 'true' story of Easter might be fascinating, but it wasn't like it would be something I could share without risking some kind of serious religious controversy...

"Oh, sorry," the Doctor said, taking a last quick bite of his egg before he handed it over to the woman in front. "Hang on to that for me- actually, go on, have it, finish it; Bella's got one already, it's full of sugar and I'm determined to keep these teeth..."

As the dark-haired woman turned around to look bemusedly between me, the Doctor, and the partly-eaten chocolate egg she now held in her hand, the Doctor pulled out the box that he'd been studying earlier with an excited smile.

"Oh, we've got excitation!" he said, still grinning broadly. "I'm picking up something very strange!"

"I know the feeling," the dark-haired woman muttered, glancing at something out of her window as the Doctor held the device up to his ear and tapped it experimentally.

As sirens blared outside and blue lights passed by the bus, I noticed the woman looking around herself with an obviously anxious expression, but the Doctor was paying too much attention to his machine to notice her anxiety and I didn't feel like bringing it up; I'd had enough experience dealing with negative attention back in Forks to feel uncomfortable drawing attention to other people.

"Uh... what _does_ that thing scan?" I asked after a few moments' silence, looking awkwardly at the Doctor as we went into a tunnel, a few police cars still behind us.

"Rhondium particles," the Doctor replied, extending an aerial on his device as he flicked at the dish with a slightly worried expression on his face. "This thing detects them... the little dish should go round, that little dish there..."

"Right now, the only thing I'm looking for is a way out," the dark-haired woman said, looking back at us with an apprehensive manner. "Can you detect me one of those?"

"Excuse me; we're having a private conversation here-" I began.

"Your friend gave me his egg out of nowhere; I think I'm entitled to be a _bit_ curious..." the woman replied with a pointed stare.

Deciding that replying wouldn't accomplish anything that ignoring her wouldn't do at least a bit quicker, I turned around to face away from her, my eyes briefly falling on an older couple sitting near the back of the bus having a conversation. I thought I heard the woman say something about voices, but apart from her shivering I wasn't able to clearly hear anything else that they were saying, and turned my attention back to the Doctor just as his device began to show signs of life once again.

"Oh, the little dish is going round!" the Doctor said, a surprised tone to his voice as though he hadn't just told us that it was capable of doing that. "And round... and round... oh blimey."

It might not be the strongest word the Doctor could have used, but somehow that 'blimey' conveyed a sense of us being in trouble more than a straightforward wear-word ever could have done, even before the device suddenly let off a spark and the little dish flew off.

"Excuse me, do you mind?" a blonde woman in her apparent forties asked, turning back to look at the Doctor as she rubbed at her hair; evidently the Doctor's 'little dish' had hit her.

"Sorry; that was my little dish," the Doctor said, standing up and hurrying towards the front of the bus, his device still bleeping and flashing even with the dish having been removed from it.

"Can't you turn that thing off?" the dark-haired woman asked.

"If he could, he _would_ -!" I began.

"Bella," the Doctor said, turning back to look at me with an urgent stare, "hold on tight."

With that ominous comment, the Doctor quickly got back into his seat and took a tight grip on the handlebar in front of him and a support bar on the other side before he raised his voice to address the other passengers. "Everyone! Hold on!"

I barely had time to process that comment before the lights seemed to suddenly go dim and the entire bus shook around me, leaving me feeling like I was suddenly stuck in an over-sized roller-coaster, sparks flashing as something apparently exploded just in front of the Doctor and I. I vaguely heard the other passengers in the bus yelling in confusion at each other, the most distinctive voice being someone asking what was going on, but I barely had time to register it before a sudden bright light filled the bus, sending us into an apparent spin. Momentarily blinded, I heard windows shattering around me as metal seemed to buckle- I momentarily flashed back to the moment when I'd first _known_ that Edward wasn't normal, but pushed that aside; he wasn't here now, and I'd just have to save myself-, the vague sound of someone falling down the stairs before the Doctor suddenly yelled at the driver to stop the bus.

The subsequent massive jolt suggested that the Doctor's instruction had been obeyed, but it still took me a moment to realise that there wasn't anything else happening around me, prompting me to slowly blink my eyes open as I took in the sight around me. As the Doctor got to his feet from where he'd fallen to the floor, I noted that the lower deck of the bus had somehow become twisted as though it had been through some kind of violent stress, but that suddenly became irrelevant as I noted the sudden brilliance of the light outside our windows, a light that definitely did _not_ belong to a London night.

Taking a quick moment to confirm that the other passengers in the bus were all right- everyone seemed dazed, but they _were_ all moving-, I stood up from my seat to stare at the sight outside the windows as my eyes adjusted to the light.

"Oh my God..." I said, unable to believe what I was seeing.

"Yep; _that's_ different," the Doctor commented, a grim expression on his face as he took in the sight outside. "I knew a friend who travelled in a bus once, but never like _that_..."

Before I could ask him what he'd meant by that, the Doctor had gotten out of his seat and was hurrying towards the door, leaving me to follow him. As the Time Lord opened the bus doors, he stepped out to take in our new surroundings, leaving me to stand beside him as the rest of the passengers began to follow our cue and file out of the bus.

"End of the line," the Doctor said, his hands in his pockets as he took in our new location. "Call it a hunch, but I think we've gone a little bit further than Brixton..."

The sight of the vast desert outside the door made it more than obvious that the Doctor's assessment was correct; whatever had just happened to us that had seemingly totally destroyed the bus's upper deck, we were at least on a different part of the planet, and that was assuming we were even still _on_ Earth...

Then I glanced up and took in the three suns blazing in the sky above us, and I knew that we were in the worst-case-scenario; the Doctor and I were stuck on another planet, with a small group depending on us to get them home, no sign of advanced civilisation anywhere nearby, and without even any access to the TARDIS-

_The Doctor and I_?

I wasn't sure what surprised me more; the fact that I was already thinking of myself as part of a team with the Doctor as the other member- OK, so he was the leader and I was just a colleague; the point still stood-, or the fact that I was already subconsciously assigning myself a leadership role in this situation. Back in Forks I'd always followed the Cullens' or Jake's recommendations when faced with an immediate crisis, and here I was, already trying to think of a way to take charge in a situation...

Then again, it all came down to expertise, when I thought about it. Back in Forks, the Cullens and the pack had always been more obviously knowledgeable when it came to dealing with the possibility of vampire threats, whereas here the Doctor and I were almost certainly the only people with any real experience in travelling to other planets (Even if my experience consisted of a few trips to a restaurant, the local equivalent of the royal kennel, an abandoned interstellar petrol station, and a slave mine, that was still more planets than most people went to), so it was only natural that I'd think of this as something where I could take charge...

"But that's impossible!" the blonde woman who'd commented on the Doctor's dish earlier said, her voice drawing my attention back to the present as I turned to look at her, noting as I did so that smoke was ceasing to rise from the bus and the Doctor was now lying on the ground wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses as he picked up a handful of sand and let it fall back to the ground in front of him. "There are three suns. _Three_ of them!"

Looking up, I noticed that she was right; one sun seemed to be orange and looked like it was setting, while another one was a brilliant white, and the third actually seemed to be slightly _blue_...

"Like when all those planets were up in the sky!" one of the young men suddenly said (Judging by the Doctor's reaction, I'd need to ask him about that; evidently _something_ interesting had happened to Earth in its recent past and my future...).

"But it was Earth that moved back then, wasn't it?" the other young man said, looking over at the previous speaker as the bus driver walked out of the bus. "This time it's us, we've moved... the whole bus."

"Oh, man, we're on another world!" the first man said, looking out at the sand before him with an awed expression.

Glancing back at the bus, I noticed that the driver was now studying the bus, the smoke that had previously been coming from the shattered roof now dying down to the point that it had almost stopped.

"It's still intact, though!" he said, sounding slightly pleased at the news. "Not as bad as it looks, if the chassis's still holding together. Oh, my boss is gonna murder me!"

"But can you still drive it?" the blonde woman asked, looking urgently at him.

"Nah, the wheels are stuck," the driver said, indicating where the bus's wheels were half-sunk in the sand. "Look at them, they're never gonna budge."

Glancing at the wheels, I didn't need my mechanic lessons with Jacob to know that he was right; the entire bus was too firmly stuck in the sand for us to do anything with it right now.

There might not be anywhere for us _to_ go- unless the Doctor had some major epiphany about our current location that he hadn't shared with us yet-, but that didn't mean that the lack of transportation didn't suck.

How was the Doctor going to get us back to Earth when the thing that had brought us here wouldn't work...?


	2. Clarifying the 'How'

A few minutes later, with the rest of the passengers still trying to calm themselves down and figure out what they should do next, the Doctor was sitting on the sand a short distance away from the bus, examining the material with a thoughtful expression. A short distance away, the dark-haired woman pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the large bag currently resting at her feet and placed them on her face, smiling slightly down at the Doctor.

"Ready for every emergency," she said by way of explanation, as the Doctor and I glanced at her.

"Me too," the Doctor noted, removing the glasses that he was wearing to aim the sonic screwdriver briefly at the lens, causing them to turn black, before putting them back on his face, following that up by pulling a smaller pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and tossing them to me. Checking the glasses, I was quickly surprised to note that they fit my face pretty much perfectly, but decided that it wasn't worth wondering how he did that; after some of the things I'd seen the Doctor take out of those pockets, I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that they were far bigger than they looked.

"So, I know that she's Bella-" the dark-haired woman said.

"Bella Swan," I interrupted, looking pointedly at her.

"Christina," the woman said, briefly indicating herself before she turned back to the Doctor. "But what's your name?"

"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor replied, as he reached down to take a handful of sand.

"Name, not rank," Christina said, looking at him in slight confusion.

"The Doctor," the Doctor repeated, as he poured the sand he'd just picked up into his other hand.

"Surname?" Christina asked.

"The Doctor," the Doctor said again, casually shifting through the sand in his outstretched palm with his fingers.

"You're called 'the Doctor'?" Christina asked, finally accepting that she wasn't going to get a different response no matter how she phrased her question.

"Yes I am," the Doctor muttered, his voice low as he focused his attention on his current analysis of the sand.

"That's not a name-" Christina began.

"It's what he goes by, so it's his name; just leave it," I said, glaring back at her- we were on another _planet_ ; I felt safe saying that we had more important things to worry about than names- as the Doctor continued his analysis of the ground around us.

"Funny sort of sand, this," he said, holding a few specks of it up close to his nose. "There's a trace of something else..."

As I turned to look at him, the Doctor dabbed a small amount of sand on his tongue, but quickly worked it out, his tongue moving rapidly in and out of his mouth as though trying to push the sand away.  
  
"Oh, not good..." he muttered, once his tongue had ceased its bizarre motions.  
  
"Well, it wouldn't be; it's sand," Christina pointed out, as though she was surprised that the Doctor had made such an obvious statement; personally, I was fairly sure that he meant something more than just the fact that he'd 'eaten' sand, but the Doctor simply declined to respond to Christina's comment as he stood up, even if his expression left me with a bad feeling about whatever it was he'd tasted...  
  
"Hold on a minute, I saw you, mate!" another voice said, prompting the three of us to turn around to see the dark-skinned young man pointing angrily at the Doctor as he walked towards us. "You had that thing, that-that machine; did you makethis happen?"  
  
"Oh, humans on buses, always blaming me..." the Doctor said, looking upwards briefly as he spoke- I wondered what he meant by that, but quickly concluded that it was something I should ask him later- before he turned his attention back to the passengers as they began to gather around him, clearly looking for answers to the other man's accusation. "Look, if you must know, I was tracking a hole in the fabric of reality- call it a hobby-, but it was a tiny little hole, no danger to anyone."  
  
His voice became lower and slightly sadder as he looked at the area around us. "Suddenly it gets big, and we drive right through it..."  
  
"Then where is it?" the driver asked, turning around as he looked at the barren landscape surrounding the bus. "There's nothing, there's just sand!"  
  
"All right," the Doctor said, walking over to stand near the back of the bus, picking up a handful of sand as he walked. "If you want proof, we through... _this_!"  
  
As he spoke, he threw the sand into the air, revealing what I could only describe as an invisible wall behind the bus, the air where the sand struck it rippling with a fizzling noise while creating a view that reminded me of oil rippling over water. Glancing around, I wasn't surprised to see the obvious awe on the faces of the other passengers; even after what else I'd seen since I started travelling with the Doctor, what he'd just revealed to us _was_ rather impressive.  
  
"And that's...?" Christina asked.  
  
"A door," the Doctor replied, his hands in his pockets as he walked back towards the rest of the group. "A door in space."  
  
"So what you're saying is," the driver said, walking towards the Doctor with a slightly hesitant smile on his face, "on the other side of that... is home? We can get to London through there?"  
  
"The bus came through," the Doctor began, moving his head in an awkward manner- I wondered if he'd been about to shake his head before deciding he didn't want to, but figured that it wasn't worth my while trying to work that out; the Doctor could be a very complicated man to understand at times-, "but we can't."  
  
"Well, then what are we waiting for?" the driver said- whether he'd misunderstood or simply didn't believe the Doctor's comments-, looking around at the others before he began to hurry towards the 'door'.  
  
"No, don't," the Doctor began, looking urgently after the driver, his voice rising as he approached the door.  
  
"I'm going home, mate-!" the driver began before he reached the point where the Doctor had thrown the sand.  
  
"I said _don't_ -!" the Doctor began, just as the air suddenly rippled around the driver. The old man screamed as his body burst into flames, leaving the rest of the bus's passengers staring in shock for the moment between the fire starting and his body vanishing.  
  
Even after seeing the Cullens burn James and hearing about the Quillettes burn Laurent- even if I hadn't explicitly seen James die, I'd seen what the Cullens were starting to do to him-, it was something different to actually see an entire human being just get... _incinerated_ like that...  
  
"Oh my god..." the young man who'd accused the Doctor earlier said, clearly in shock, the one who'd been upstairs busy comforting the clearly horrified blonde woman. "He... he was a skeleton, man; he was bones, just bones..."  
  
"It was the bus," the Doctor explained, turning around and walking over to stand alongside the bus as he stared up at its mangled exterior. "Look at the damage; that was the bus protecting us. Great big box made of metal."  
  
"Rather like a Faraday cage?" Christina asked.  
  
"Like in a thunderstorm, yeah?" the other young man said from where he was still comforting the blonde, his voice trembling even as he was clearly trying to hold it together. "Safest place is inside a car, 'cause the metal conducts the lightning right through. We did it in school!"  
  
"But if we can only travel back inside the bus..." Christina began.  
  
"There's too much damage for it to protect us; the top's pretty much _shattered_..." I finished for her, looking questioningly over at the Doctor.  
  
" _Slightly_ different dynamics, with a wormhole," the Doctor said as he walked over to stand between Christina and I to take a better look at the bus. "There's enough metal to make it work... I think... I hope."  
  
"Then we have to drive five tons of bus, which is currently buried in the sand, and we've got nothing but our bare hands," Christina stated before she glanced over at the Doctor. "Correct?"  
  
"I'd say nine-and-a-half tons, but the point still stands, yes," the Doctor confirmed.  
  
"Then we need to apply ourselves to the problem with discipline!" Christina said, her tone resolute as she reached into the bag and began to search for something. "Which starts with appointing a leader."  
  
"Yes, at last, thank you, so-" the Doctor began.  
  
"Well, thank goodness you've got me!" Christina interjected, leaving me to stare incredulously at the Doctor as she walked past him to address the rest of the passengers.  
  
"OK, she's just some woman who happened to be on this while you're the last Time Lord who was tracking whatever sent us here; why does _she_ get to put herself in charge?" I asked, looking urgently at him for some explanation about why he hadn't voiced more of a protest at this sudden turn of events.  
  
"Sometimes it's easier to let a commanding personality take control in the middle of a crisis like this," the Doctor commented, a slightly grim tone to his voice that left me wondering if this tied into that comment he'd made earlier about people on buses blaming him, as Christina ordered the rest of the group into the bus- I vaguely heard her mention that it would at least be slower backing in there than roasting out here- before she turned back to us.  
  
"And you," she said, her voice now assuming a more commanding tone as she addressed us. "Bella Swan and 'the Doctor'."  
  
"Yes, ma'am," the Doctor said, nodding briefly at her before he walked off into the bus. I shot a brief glare at Christina- the Doctor had already demonstrated a greater knowledge of this situation and she _still_ wanted to take charge?-, but pushed that annoyance aside and followed the Doctor into the bus.  
  
As the Doctor had pointed out, we had a situation right now, and the only way to solve that was to work together; I was still certain that the Doctor could do a better job than Christina, but so long as _somebody_ was coordinating our efforts I supposed that the fine details weren't _that_ important, particularly since the Doctor could probably take charge if he felt Christina was making a mistake...


	3. Team Identification

As I sat in the hot bus alongside the Doctor, the other passengers gathered around us, I wondered if it was fair to be angry at Christina for appearing so casual in the middle of something that, as far as she knew, nobody else had any real experience with (The Doctor's talk about a hole in space earlier wouldn't exactly make anyone who heard it think 'alien', after all; she maybe thought he was just a weird but human scientist); what had she actually _done_ to make her think she was better at taking charge here than the only person who'd shown that he knew what he was doing here?

Maybe I was just biased because I knew what the Doctor was capable of, but I couldn't help how I felt; I'd spent so long having to rely on other people to save me that it felt... awkward... having someone else taking charge now (Particularly someone who didn't seem to be taking this thing that seriously; she'd just made a joke about the bad smell inside the bus without anybody panicking and sweating more, which _really_ didn't seem to be in good taste given the possibility that we'd end up _rotting_ in here...).

"Point six: team identification!" Christina said, as she finally made a point that I could legitimately agree with. "Names. I'm Christina, this man is apparently 'the Doctor'-"

"Hello!" the Doctor added, waving one hand at everyone before he indicated me. "And this is my friend Bella-"

" _Just_ friends," I added, even as I smiled slightly at him and the other passengers; as much as I liked the Doctor, I didn't want to give anyone the wrong impression about either of us, even without the issue of our apparent age gap.

"And you?" Christina asked, looking at the young man who'd been comforting the blonde earlier.

"Nathan," the man said with a slight shrug.

"I'm Barclay," the Doctor's earlier accuser added.

"Angela," the blonde said. "Angela Whittaker."

"My name's Louis- everyone calls me Lou," the older man in the back said, "and this is Carmen."

"Excellent; memorise those names, there might be a test," Christina said with that same smug smile that was beginning to get on my nerves. "Point seven, rations; Angela Whittaker, how much food have you got there?"

"It's just the weekly shop," Angela answered, indicating the shopping bags she was carrying.

"Then you're in charge of rations," Christina said, still smiling (I wasn't sure if I should be impressed or frustrated at that smile; I may not like people making mountains out of metaphorical molehills, but she could at least _acknowledge_ that we were facing a dangerous situation here). "Any water?"

"Just orange juice and milk," Angela replied after a brief glance at the bags.

"Guard them with your life," Christina said, a slightly more solemn tone that somehow still managed to sound flippant.

"Will do!" Angela replied with a slight smile.

"Good girl," Christina said, before she turned back to addressing the whole bus. "Now, point eight, assessment and application of knowledge. Over to you, the Doctor."

"I thought you were in charge?" the Doctor said, looking at her in slight surprise as she indicated him.

"I am," Christina replied with her apparently usual smug tone, hands behind her back. "And a good leader utilises her strengths. You would seem to be the brainbox, so, start boxing."

For a moment, I wondered if I should say something about her attitude- she couldn't just take command _and_ recognise that the Doctor was more knowledgeable about the current situation than she was-, but pushed that aside; as I'd told myself earlier, what mattered right now was working out how to get everyone back to Earth, not getting caught up in a power struggle.

"Right," the Doctor said, standing up to sit on the handrail of his seat as he looked around at the other passengers. "So! The wormhole; we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was just an accident-"

"No it wasn't," Carmen suddenly said, looking around at the others, her tone possessing the uncertainty that came from wanting to avoid attention rather than a belief that the speaker was in the wrong.

"Point nine, don't interrupt-" Christina began.

"No, I don't mind," the Doctor said, as the other passengers in the bus turned to look at her. "Carmen, what is it, what d'you mean...?"

"That thing, the doorway," Carmen explained, indicating the back window of the bus in the direction of the wormhole. "Someone made it. For a reason."

"How do you know?" the Doctor asked.

"She's got a gift," Lou said, smiling at the other passengers as Carmen paused in an embarrassed manner that I recognised from my own reluctance. "Ever since she was a little girl, she can just... tell things. We do the lottery, twice a week."

"You don't look like millionaires," Christina said, her tone obviously sceptical as she looked at them.

"No," Lou said, smiling warmly at his wife, dismissing Christina's question, "but we win ten pounds. Every week, twice a week, ten pounds. Don't tell me that's not a gift!"

Even without playing the lottery myself, I could see what Lou meant; that kind of 'luck' was too great to just be a coincidence, particularly not if it had gone on for as long as Lou's tone implied it had.

I might have been sceptical of the idea of seeing the future if I'd just been travelling with the Doctor, but given my contact with the Cullens and Alice's own ability to see the future- I forced down the momentary pain I felt at the thought of Edward's family; this wasn't the time for that-, I was definitely more willing to consider the idea that Lou was telling the truth...

"Tell me, Carmen," the Doctor said, putting one hand behind his back as he looked thoughtfully at her. "how many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," Carmen said, followed a moment later by "Four."

"Very good!" the Doctor said (He must have moved one finger to test her). "Low-level psychic ability, exacerbated by an alien sun."

"That's _possible_?" I asked, looking at him in surprise. "For people to... to see the future, I mean?"

I knew that Alice had theorised after doing some research based on James's comments that her family had sent her to the asylum after she started to have her visions, but that was only a theory and I'd always kind of assumed that Alice had just been overly sensitive as a human or something like that; the idea that she could have seen what she saw now as a _human_...

"Under the right conditions, yeah; as I said, Carmen's gift is probably being enhanced beyond its usual limits by where we are," the Doctor explained, before he turned his attention back to Carmen. "Sorry about that, Carmen; the important thing now is, what can you see? What's out there?"

"Something..." Carmen said, her eyes apparently looking at something beyond what we could see without changing much from their usual appearance (I wondered if this meant that she was stronger than Alice; you could always _tell_ when Alice was seeing things, even if Carmen's words so far suggested that she was getting a more basic picture than Alice ever had). "Something is coming. Riding on the wind. And shining."

"What is it?" the Doctor asked.

"Death," Carmen said after a moment's pause. "Death is coming."

"We're gonna die..." Angela said, lowering her head as she started to sob, followed by a sudden uproar in the bus as all the other passengers seemed to start talking at once. I tried to keep track of who said what, but between Barclay and Nathan bemoaning the fact that nobody would ever know what had happened to us, Christina's attempts to re-establish some kind of control, and Carmen's obvious panic at the situation despite Lou's attempt to keep her calm, I was rapidly beginning to lose patience with everyone around me before the Doctor suddenly stepped in.

"All right," he said, raising his voice as he addressed the other passengers, "now stop it, everyone, _stop it_!"

In the momentary silence that had settled over the bus after his order- with hundreds of years under his belt he could afford to have quite a commanding presence-, the Doctor quickly moved from his seat to sit beside Angela in front of me, looking urgently at the blonde woman.

"Angela," he said, his tone now calmer as he looked at the still-sobbing Angela, her head twitching slightly as she tried to look up at him, "look at me, Angela, answer me one question, Angela, that's it, at me, there we go, Angela, just answer me one thing; when you got on this bus, where were you going?"

"Doesn't matter now, does it?" Angela replied, still sobbing as she turned to look away from the Time Lord.

"Answer the question," the Doctor said, still looking encouragingly at her.

"Just home," Angela replied.

"And what's home?" the Doctor said.

"Me, and Mike," Angela replied, shrugging slightly as she sniffed. "And Suzanne- that's my daughter; she's eighteen."

"Suzanne; good," the Doctor said, before he spun around to sit down beside me as he turned to look at Barclay. "And you?"

"Dunno," Barclay said, his tone slightly reluctant as though he was embarrassed to be saying this much. "Going round to Tina's."

"Who's Tina?" the Doctor asked abruptly. "Your girlfriend?"

"Not yet," Barclay replied, awkwardness fading as he made a slight smile at the memory.

"Good boy," the Doctor said, grinning in approval before he turned to look at the other young man. "What about you, Nathan?"

"Bit strapped for cash; I lost my job last week," Nathan replied, awkwardly shrugging as he looked down at his hands. "Just gonna stay in, watch TV."

"Brilliant," the Doctor said, a look of admiration on his face at the simplicity of Nathan's goals before he turned around to look at Lou and Carmen. "And you two?"

"I was going to cook," Lou said.

"It's his turn tonight," Carmen said, apparently more relaxed now as she smiled at her husband. "Then I have to clean up."

"And what's for tea?" the Doctor asked.

"Chops," Lou replied, smiling slightly as he spoke. "Nice couple of chops, and gravy. Nothing special."

"Oh, that's special, Lou," the Doctor said, nodding as he spoke. "That is _so_ special. Chops and gravy..."

I wondered if he was going to elaborate on his views on that topic, but then he turned to look at the only person left who hadn't shared their goals so far. "What about you, Christina?"

"I was going... so far away," Christina replied, her head lowered slightly as she responded, demonstrating reluctance for the first time since she'd started talking.

"Far away," the Doctor repeated, ignoring the possibility of asking further questions as he took a look around at the other passengers once again. "Chops and gravy, watching TV, Mike and Suzanne and poor old Tina-"

"Hey!" Barclay said, even if the smile on his face as he spoke made it clear that he didn't mind that much.

"Just think of them," the Doctor said, glancing out of the window as he spoke. "'Cause that planet out there, all three suns and wormholes and alien sand, that planet is _nothing_ \- d'you hear me; _nothing_ -, compared to all those things waiting for you. Food and home and people... hold on to that. 'Cause we're gonna get there. I promise. Bella and I are going to get you home."

For a moment, I wondered if I should panic at the idea of him putting that kind of pressure on my shoulders, but then I turned to look at him and realised that he hadn't meant to put any kind of pressure on me; he was simply stating a fact.

He was so _sure_ that I could help him with something like this, when I hadn't done anything to help him so far apart from having a sudden personal revelation while I was stuck in a Dalek mine that I hadn't even told him the full details of...

I didn't know what I could do to assist him in this current task, but I did know that I was already resolved to do everything I could to help him; after what the Doctor had done for me already, helping him get this bus back to Earth was comparatively minor in the grand scheme of things.


	4. Fixing the Bus

With the immediate questions of who we were and what was happening answered, the original 'command dynamic' established by Christina seemed to have been abandoned in favour of a more coordinated work ethic. While Lou seemed to be more focused on keeping Carmen calm inside the bus- not that I could blame him; if what had happened to Alice while she was human was any example, human physics apparently had some trouble focusing even at the best of times-, Angela, Barclay, Nathan and I were working to get the bus into a condition where it could move again based on the Doctor and Christina's recommendations (She was still trying to _act_ like a leader, even if it was fairly clear to everyone else that the Doctor had that position now).

"Here we go!" Barclay said as he, Nathan and I hurried out of the bus with some of the seat-backs in our hands (It might be vandalism, but given that we were on another planet and the bus's chassis had already been virtually ripped apart by the wormhole, I doubted anyone at the company was going to mind that much).

"That's my boys... and girl, of course," the Doctor said, grinning briefly at Nathan and Barclay before he noticed me standing with them and quickly corrected himself before he turned his attention to the seat cover he now held in his hands. "D'you see, we lay a flat surface between the bus and the wormhole, like duckboards, and we reverse into it!"

"We should probably flatten the tires a bit while we're at it," I added, recalling a few of the more minor details of mechanics I'd picked up while I was working on my motorbike with Jake. "If we can spread the bus's weight out a bit more-"

"It should give us more grip against the sand," Christina added, looking slightly curiously at me. "How did you know that?"

"A friend gave me a few mechanics lessons when I was back home; I picked up a trick or two," I replied; if I was going to help out here, I was going to establish that I wasn't just useful simply because I was the Doctor's friend. "You?"

"Holidays in the Kalahari," Christina replied (I wondered briefly where that was, but quickly concluded that it wasn't worth asking; if it was anything like this place, I couldn't see myself wanting to go there myself).

"Yeah, but those wheels go deep," Barclay said, indicating the sand around the bus with a grim voice.

"Then start digging," Christina replied with a slight smile.

"With what?" Barclay asked, voicing my own thoughts on the suggestion- while we could use our hands, the hot sun wasn't going to do our skin any favours in this kind of situation-, only for Christina to pull a fold-up spade out of her bag.

"With this," she clarified, holding it out towards Barclay before the Doctor took it, snapped it open, and then handed it on to Barclay.

"Oh, nice one!" Barclay said, subsequently turning around and heading back to the bus, crouching down to begin digging at the sand around the wheels.

"Anything else in there?" the Doctor asked, looking at Christina with a slightly impressed look that prompted a brief but irrational surge of jealousy in me before I pushed it aside; after the mess I'd been in following my last crisis of self-worth when _he_ left, I was _not_ going to start panicking just because the Doctor was showing an appreciation for someone who wasn't me!

"Try this," Christina said, taking a small axe out of the bag and handing it to Nathan as he stood beside us. "It might help with the seats."

"Thanks!" Nathan said, hurrying back onto the bus.

"I can't find the keys!" Angela's voice suddenly called out from the bus, prompting the Doctor and I to hurry back to the door. Looking inside the bus, I was only slightly surprised to see Angela sitting in the driver's seat as she anxiously examined the controls; evidently the Doctor's encouraging words earlier had helped inspire her to take the initiative in finding ways to help.

"No, buses don't have keys," the Doctor said, quickly falling into his usual 'renaissance-man'-esque role as a seemingly limitless source of knowledge (How _did_ he know all this stuff?). "There's the master switch, then it's one button for start, the other button for stop, yeah?"

"Right, hold on... I've got it!" Angela said, smiling briefly as she flipped the switch before she assumed a more resolute expression. "Here we go, hold tight; ding ding!"

As she pressed a button on the dashboard in front of her, the engine briefly started, but a subsequent groan and shuddering dashed the momentary encouragement I'd felt at Angela's discovery.

"Doesn't sound too good..." the Doctor said, before he turned around and hurried towards the back of the bus, Christina and I close behind him as he used the sonic screwdriver to open the back hatch, revealing a mass of steaming metal.

"Never mind losing half the top deck, d'you know what's worse?" the Doctor said, reaching out one hand to examine the metal structure in front of us even as Christina and I waved our hands to try and dispel the suddenly-released smoke. "Sand... tiny little grains of sand. The engine's clogged up."

"Anyone know mechanics?" Christina asked, walking out from behind the bus to address the other passengers gathered around the side.

"Me!" Barclay said, standing up from where he'd been digging. "I did a two-week NVQ at the garage. Never finished it, but..."

"Hey, I spent some time helping a friend of mine repair a motorbike before I met the Doctor," I said, smiling reassuringly at him as I walked over to stand beside Christina, indicating the bus's engine with a smile. "I get that it's a different engine, but between the two of us, we can probably fill in enough gaps to get this thing working."

"Good call; nothing wrong with having a group," the Doctor said, smiling reassuringly at me before he looked over at Barclay. "You and Bella just try stripping the air filter, fast as you can; I'll be back in two ticks-"

" _Back_?" I repeated, looking urgently over at him as he began to walk off towards a nearby dune. "Where are you going-?"

"I need to see if I can find something else on this planet; you've got a good grasp of the situation here, but we're not going to get anywhere just standing around this bus," the Doctor said, nodding briefly at me before he dusted his hands off and started walking away. "Be right back!"

"Wait a minute!" Christina yelled after him, grabbing her bag as she walked after the Doctor. "You're the man with all the answers; I'm not letting you out of my sight!"

I wondered if I should feel strange at the idea of the seemingly independent Christina being so interested in staying with the Doctor when I was willing to stay right where I was, but supposed that it all came down to a matter of faith in the end; unlike Christina, I could at least be sure that the Doctor would come back for us, whereas she didn't even know a _thing_ about his past...

"So," Barclay asked after we'd spent a few moments working on the bus- taking this engine apart wasn't easy without the right tools, but at least it was reasonably cool after being stopped for so long and kept in the shade of the engine-, "you and that Doctor bloke-"

"We're just friends, as I said; he's a _bit_ too old for me," I said, looking pointedly at Barclay even as I privately noted that at least he wasn't likely to hit on me if he thought I was single given that reference to 'Tina' in the bus earlier.

"Just wondered where you'd met 'im, that's all," Barclay said, looking at me with a slight glare before he turned back to the engine, muttering under his breath before I reached out to touch his arm.

"Sorry," I said, smiling awkwardly at him. "It's just... I was in a bit of a bad place when the Doctor met me- my boyfriend left me after a rather... intense... relationship and I was feeling more than a bit depressed-, and he helped me realise a few things about myself; I'm just... I just don't want people thinking that I'm _with_ him just because I'm with him... and I know that doesn't make sense..."

"Hey, fair enough," Barclay said, smiling reassuringly at me as we turned back to our current work. "Where's home for you, anyway?"

"Forks, Washington, but it's been a while since I've been there; like I said, I had to get away from it all after Edward left me, and the Doctor gave me a chance to do that," I said, grateful for the maturity that Renee and Charlie had commented on in the past; so long as I avoided providing any specific details, Barclay and the others would probably assume I was just travelling during my gap year or something like that.

"Who is he, anyway?" Nathan asked, standing up from where he'd been digging around the left rear wheel as he looked at me. "I mean, all that stuff he knew about wormholes...?"

"The Doctor's a man of many talents," I said, deciding to stick to the undeniable facts without bringing in the 'alien' factor unless I had to; that kind of thing was the Doctor's secret to reveal, not mine. "I don't know where he picked some of those facts up, but trust me; if he says something's true, it's true."

"Can he do it?" another voice said. Looking up, I was surprised to see Angela standing there, looking at me with a certain desperation that I wasn't used to seeing on an adult woman's face; even when I'd been more of a parent to Renee than she was to me, she'd never looked at me as though I was the one expected to 'save' her...

"Let's just say... I've seen him do the impossible before," I said, smiling reassuringly at her, ignoring the disconcerting feeling of being a leader of a group of people I'd never met before getting on that bus.

How did I go from being hunted by vampires and guarded by werewolves to being the leader of a lost group of crash survivors on an alien planet (Even if the last sounded a _lot_ better out of context than it was)?

But the answer to that was obvious; I'd met the Doctor.

He may not have explicitly taught me anything like Jacob had, and Edward had shared a lot more about his past with me than the Doctor had done so far (If I counted our relationship as having really begun after he saved me in Seattle- before that Edward and I were casual acquaintances at best-, Edward had told me all about his family in a few days, where the Doctor had taken that amount of time just to reveal what had happened to his _planet_ ), but there was something about the Doctor's approach to life... the way he dived in to every situation he discovered, whether big or small... the way he could show wonder at everything from giant nebulas to baby Aggedors... the way he never showed fear even when faced with the race that destroyed his own... the way he wanted to keep me safe _without_ locking me away or doing everything himself...

The Doctor might take point when we were in a crisis situation, but at least he did so because he genuinely was the best person to take charge in most situations, and he did _try_ and let me get involved; Edward and Jacob would both have been perfectly happy for me to sit at home and wait for them to come back safe or for others to come back and let me know that they'd been killed.

Here... I was _doing_ something.

As I turned back to the engine, I fought down the smile I felt threatening to spread across my face at that thought; stuck on a distant planet, with no idea what we were doing here or how to get back, only a relatively mismatched and random group of people available to get us back to Earth, and I was happy because I was _doing_ something...

It may not have made sense, but my world stopped making sense when I fell in love with a vampire; after that, anything else seemed almost conventional.


	5. Calling UNIT

"Hey," Barclay said, looking up from the engine as he and I finished clearing out the last of the sand, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. "Is that them?"

For a moment I thought he meant that he'd seen the people responsible for bringing us here, but then I looked more closely and realised that he was actually talking about what appeared to be the Doctor and Christina, the Doctor leading Christina as they hurried towards the bus.

"Doctor?" I asked, looking urgently at my friend as he hurried up to me, an urgent expression on his face. "What's-?"

"We've got some kind of storm approaching us, so I need to make an urgent call; where's your phone?" he asked me.

"My what-?" I began, briefly wishing he'd clarify what he meant by 'some kind of storm'; given what I'd encountered with the Doctor so far, the fact that he hadn't described it as a simple sandstorm didn't really sound particularly encouraging...

"Your cellphone!" he repeated urgently.

"Uh... I don't exactly _have_ one on me, Doctor..." I said, wishing that I had something less stupid to say; I'd left my phone in my truck when I went cliff-diving and I'd forgotten to go back for it before the Doctor had originally shown me to the TARDIS (Not that it had really mattered before now; where was the point in having a phone when I was travelling in time and was planning to go home to a point before anyone knew I'd even left?).

"Oh, right; sorry..." the Doctor said, looking awkwardly at me for a moment before he looked at the other passengers. "Does anyone else have a phone I could borrow?"

"Uh... here's mine..." Barclay said, taking his phone out of his pocket and passing it to the Doctor.

"Thanks," the Doctor said, nodding at Barclay as he pulled out the sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the phone.

"You're hardly going to get a signal; we're on another planet-!" Christina began.

"Oh, just watch me!" the Doctor said, his teeth briefly gritted as he aimed the screwdriver at the phone for a few moments before he slipped the screwdriver back into his pocket and began to dial the phone. "Right now, bit of hush, thank you; I've got to remember the number, a very important number..."

As he spoke, he held the phone out in front of him, the object in question now on speakerphone as he listened for the response.

" _Hello_ ," a voice said at last. " _Pizza Geronimo_?"

"And again," the Doctor said, a slight edge of embarrassment to his voice as he terminated the call- fortunately, nobody seemed inclined to question the mistake- and began to dial again. "Seven- _six_ , not six- _seven_..."

" _This is the Unified Intelligence Taskforce_ ," another voice said as the phone finished dialling the new number (I briefly wondered who the 'Unified Intelligence Taskforce' were, but decided I'd have to ask that question later; if the Doctor could contact someone who could help him get us back, that was all that mattered right now). " _Please select from one of the following four options. If you want to report a UFO sighting, press one_..."

"Ahhh, hate these things!" the Doctor said, shaking his head in exasperation.

"No, if you keep your finger pressed on zero, you get through to a real person," Angela added, glancing over at Barclay with a slight smile as he looked at her in confusion. "I saw it on Watchdog!"

"Thank you, Angela!" the Doctor said, pressing the button in question as he sat down in the chair.

" _UNIT helpline_ ," a woman's voice now said. " _Which department would you like_?"

"Listen," he said, his tone solemn as he spoke, "it's the Doctor. It's me!"

Apparently, that statement was enough for whoever was on the other line, the Doctor quickly turning off the speakerphone and holding the phone to his ear before he received a vocal response, subsequently smiling at whatever the person at the other end was saying before he spoke again. "Yeah, I know I've got a bit of a reputation there, but I need your help; do you have a team investigating the recent disappearance of a Number 200 bus at the Queen's Gate Tunnel in London?" After another pause, he smiled. "Excellent; can you put me through to the commanding officer?"

"Commanding officer?" I said, looking at him in surprise as I walked over to sit down beside him. "Who are you calling?"

"The Unified Intelligence Taskforce; basically the anti-alien defence force of the U.N.," the Doctor said, smiling over at me even as he continued listening to the phone. "I worked for them as a scientific advisor back in the seventies- the TARDIS was broken and I needed access to the resources they could acquire to repair it-, and I try and keep in touch with them in case of situations like this..."

" _Doctor_?" a voice said at the other end of the phone, the Doctor falling silent as he listened. " _This is Captain Erisa Magumbo. Might I say, sir, it's an honour_."

"Did you just salute?" the Doctor asked, a slightly surprised tone to his voice.

" _...No_ ," the woman on the phone replied, clearly awkward about the Doctor's deduction.

"Erisa," the Doctor continued, clearly recognising that it wasn't time to discuss that issue right now, "it's about the bus. HQ said you're at the tunnel, yeah?"

" _And where are you_?" the captain replied.

"I'm on the bus, but apart from that, not a clue," the Doctor said, leaning out of the opposite window to look around at the vast desert landscape surrounding us. "Except it's very pretty, and pretty dangerous."

" _A body came through here_ ," Captain Magumbo said. " _Have you sustained any more fatalities_?"

"No, and we're not going to," the Doctor said, his tone resolute as he sat back down on his original chair while he continued to speak. "But I'm stuck; I haven't got the TARDIS, and I need to analyse that wormhole."

" _We've got a scientific advisor on site_ ," Captain Magumbo said, leaving me scrambling to stay close despite the curious expressions on the faces of the other passengers; if I was going to help the Doctor on this, I felt obligated to at least _try_ and keep up with what he was planning. " _Doctor Malcolm Taylor; just the man you need, he's a genius_."

"Oh, is he?" the Doctor said, his tone now expressing obvious scepticism. "We'll see about that..."

I thought about being offended for my species, but decided that it wasn't an issue that was worth bringing up; compared to most of the human race, the Doctor _was_ ridiculously intelligent...

" _It's the Doctor_ ," Captain Magumbo's voice said suddenly over the line.

" _No, I'm all right now, thanks_ ," an unfamiliar male voice replied, its tone a slightly nasally one that made me wonder if the speaker had a cold. " _It was just a little bit of a sore throat. Although I've got to be honest, a cup of tea might be nice_."

" _It's_ the _Doctor_ ," Magumbo repeated, clearly frustrated at the man's misunderstanding.  
  
" _D'you mean... the_ Doctor _doctor_?" the man who I assumed was Malcolm Taylor replied, now obviously impressed at this turn of events (I had to wonder what the Doctor had encountered with UNIT to make Malcolm sound that impressed just at hearing his name).  
  
" _I know_ ," Magumbo said, the Doctor awkwardly rubbing at his eye as she spoke. " _We all want to meet him one day, but we all know what that day will bring_ -"  
  
"I can hear everything you're saying," the Doctor said suddenly, silencing the captain's voice on the other end.  
  
" _Hello, Doctor_ ," the man who was almost certainly Malcolm Taylor replied after a momentary period of what sounded like near-stifled enthusiastic laughter. " _Oh my goodness_!"  
  
"Yes I am," the Doctor said, wincing briefly at the sheer volume of the other man's voice. "Hello Malcolm!"  
  
" _Doctor_!" Malcolm continued, laughing with almost childish joy as he spoke (I was _definitely_ going to ask the Doctor what he'd encountered with UNIT when we got back to the TARDIS). " _Oh blimey, I can't believe I'm actually speaking to you! I've read all the files_!"  
  
"Really?" the Doctor said, smiling at the news in a manner that put me in a mind of a teacher learning that a student had gone above and beyond in their current work. "What was your favourite, the giant robot?"  
  
I briefly wondered what kind of encounter involved a giant robot, but decided it wasn't worth asking him about that right now; regardless of my current curiosity, if we were going to get out of this mess, the Doctor had to focus.  
  
"No, hold on, let's deal with this wormhole," the Doctor said, apparently making the same decision I had about the time available to us.  
  
"'Scuse me," he added, suddenly turning the speakerphone function off as he walked past Angela and Barclay to sit down in the driver's seat, huddling up into the seat as I walked over to join him, Christina taking up another position a short distance behind me.  
  
"Malcolm," the Doctor said, shifting the phone to his left ear in apparent acknowledgement of my presence- the speaker was off, but I could still just about hear Malcolm's voice if I focused- as he continued to speak, "something's not making sense here; I've got a storm, and a wormhole, and I can't help thinking there's a connection. I need a complete full-range analysis of that wormhole, the whole thing."  
  
" _Well, I've probably got the wrong idea, but I've wired up an integrator, I thought it could measure the energy signature_ -" Malcolm began to explain.  
  
"No, that'll never work, now just listen to me-" the Doctor tried to interject.  
  
" _It's quite extraordinary, though_!" Malcolm said, almost as though he hadn't heard the Doctor's attempted interruption. " _I'm measuring an oscillation of 15 Malcolms per second_."  
  
"Fifteen what?" the Doctor and I said almost simultaneously, attracting puzzled stares from Christina.  
  
" _Fifteen Malcolms_ ," Malcolm clarified. " _It's my own little term. A wavelength parcel of 10 kilohertz operating in four dimensions equals one Malcolm_."  
  
"You named... a unit of measurement... after yourself?" the Doctor asked, voicing my own confusion at this twist.  
  
" _Never did Mr Watt any harm_ ," Malcolm said with a surprisingly casual tone for someone who'd made such a decision. " _Furthermore, one hundred Malcolms is a Bernard_."  
  
"Who's that, your dad?" the Doctor asked.  
  
" _Don't be ridiculous_ ," Malcolm said firmly. " _That's Quatermass_."  
  
"Right," the Doctor said, his voice low as he processed what we'd just heard before he continued speaking. "Fine, but before I die of old age- which in my case would be quite an achievement, so congratulations on that- is there anyone else I can talk to?"  
  
" _No, no, no, but listen_!" Malcolm said before I could criticise the Time Lord for his abrupt attitude- we weren't exactly in a position to complain about whatever help we could get in this situation-, his tone expressing a new sense of urgency at the Doctor's last statement. " _I set the scanner to register what it can't detect and inverted the image_."  
  
"You did what?" the Doctor said, his tone expressing disbelief once again.  
  
" _Is that wrong_?" Malcolm asked with renewed uncertainly.  
  
"No, Malcolm, that is brilliant!" the Doctor said, a new edge to his voice that I thought could be admiration if I wasan't uncertain on the grounds of having nothing else to compare it to. "So you can actually measure the wormhole? Okay, I admit, that is genius!"  
  
I couldn't precisely hear what Malcolm said in response, but the fact that the Doctor felt comfortable making that kind of statement was enough for me to work out how smart Malcolm had to be; I'd seen enough of the Doctor's opinion of his intelligence to know how smart he'd have to be to merit that kind of response from my friend.  
  
"Now," the Doctor continued urgently, leaning forward in the seat as he spoke, "run a capacity scan, I need a full report; call me back when you've done it. And Malcolm? You're my new best friend."  
  
With that, the Doctor hung up the call and turned to head out of the bus, pausing to look over at Barclay as he held up the phone. "Barclay, I'm holding on to this."  
  
"You'd better bring it back!" Barclay replied.  
  
"I'll make sure of it," I said, smiling over at the other man before I turned to hurry after the Doctor as he and Christina began to run back towards the dune they'd been examining earlier; I didn't know what was happening here, but I did know that I wasn't going to wait around in the bus to find out what it was. "Just make sure the engine's working; we'll be back soon!"  
  
As I hurried up to the Doctor and Christina, I shrugged slightly as the Doctor turned to look quizzically at me, clearly wondering what I was doing there.  
  
"Barclay and I have the engine pretty much sorted out right now- what's left is just the stuff he can tackle himself-, and if you're tracking whatever brought us here, I think three have a better chance than two," I said, my eyes narrowing slightly as I looked more directly at him. "I'm not weak, Doctor; if there's anything happening here, I'd rather I was there with you when you found it out rather than learning about it later."  
  
There was more to it, but I didn't feel right telling the Doctor about the Cullens or the Quillettes' secrets when they weren't here right now.  
  
Besides, it didn't really matter if the complex relationships I'd had before I'd started travelling with him had left me feeling rather frustrated at anything involving people keeping secrets from me if I was in a dangerous situation; the end result was that I wasn't going to let the Doctor keep secrets from me unless it had something to do with preventing me from learning something about the future and thus averting any of those 'temporal paradox' things he'd told me about during the Dalek crisis...  
  
"So," Christina asked, after we had been walking for a few moments, looking at me with a slightly teasing smile, "you wouldn't happen to know what he's a lord of, would you?"  
  
"Pardon?" I asked, looking over at the older woman in surprise at the apparently random question.  
  
"Your Doctor friend just told me that he was a Lord after I mentioned that I was a Lady-" Christina began.  
  
"You're a _Lady_?" I repeated, raising my eyebrows in an unwillingly impressed gesture; meeting an alien like the Doctor was so unusual that it was something I'd never expected to happen, but meeting a _Lady_ was something that was just possible enough in what I'd assumed to be the real world- before I'd encountered the Cullens or the Doctor, anyway- that there'd been a miniscule chance of it happening to me even then.  
  
"Lady Christina di Souza," Christina replied, smiling at me with a slightly smug expression before she turned her attention back to her original question. "Seriously, though, how does a lord know all these things?"  
  
"You're not exactly a conventional lady with that backpack-" I pointed out.  
  
"I'm just curious to know how _he_ ended up like that-" Christina tried to interject.  
  
"If the Doctor wanted you to know the answer to those questions, he'd tell you them himself," I said, staring resolutely at her, my mind already made up that she wasn't going to get any more than that.  
  
I might not have asked to become the guardian of so many secrets- the Doctor's true origins, the Cullens' real nature, the secret history of Jacob's tribe-, but as long as people trusted me enough to tell me that kind of thing, I was going to prove worthy of that trust.  
  
I just hoped that whatever we were running towards right now wouldn't be too dangerous; we still needed some time before we could get that bus in the right kind of condition to get back through the wormhole, and that was before I started thinking about the question of what had made it in the first place...  
  
Still, despite the scale of the danger we were in, I actually rather liked it; at least this time I wasn't facing a threat that I'd inadvertently caused by just being in the wrong place at the wrong time- whatever the Cullens or Jake might have said, James and Victoria would have just passed on through Forks if I hadn't been at the Cullens' baseball field at the right time-, and I could actually _do_ something to try and figure out a way to solve it.  
  
No matter what danger I was about to face, I wouldn't just stand by and let other people face it for me; I was here to help, and I was _going_ to help.


	6. Meet the Tritovores

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In advance, I feel obligated to clarify that Bella will not be able to understand the Tritovores when they initially appear; I'm basing this theory on the audio adventure "Survival of the Fittest", where the Seventh Doctor stated that the TARDIS translation effect was limited to a certain distance from the TARDIS itself (Although I'm also making a few assumptions about physiology that I'll explain later).

As I stood alongside the Doctor and Christina on top of the dune that they'd walked to earlier, I couldn't help but shudder slightly at the sight of the massive sandstorm- the Doctor had explained to me that it wasn't actually a conventional sandstorm, but it looked like one so I'd call it that until he worked out what it was instead- in front of us, even as the Doctor nonchalantly took a video recording of it with his phone.

It was one thing to be going up against Daleks or vampires; at least they were individual beings that could be confronted on a one-to-one basis, even if there wasn't realistically much that humans could do against them.

Against something that _big_...

The fact that it was a natural event only made it worse; how could we stop something that was just _there_?

"Send this back to Earth, maybe Malcolm can analyse the storm..." the Doctor muttered, thoughtfully studying the massive object before us as he spoke, the phone held up in front of him as he took a picture.

"There's something in those clouds," Christina commented, squinting slightly as she studied the sandstorm. "Something shining, look..."

Now that Christina mentioned it, I _could_ see some of the various 'specks' in that storm shining in some form...

I freely admitted that I had no idea what that kind of observation could mean as far as working out what the storm really was, but I was fairly sure that I didn't want to find out at close quarters; Edward might have criticised my instincts for not telling me to run when I learned that I was associating with vampires, but something about this situation was _really_ setting the alarm bells flaring...

"Like metal..." the Doctor mused, his words drawing me back to the present.

"Metal?" I repeated, looking at him in surprise, quickly processing the most likely reason for that comment and trying to think of something I could say to add to that theory. "What, like... something got caught in it?"

"More like something's _flying_ in it..." the Doctor muttered, staring thoughtfully at the storm before he shifted his attention to the phone.

"Did you hear something?" Christina asked, before I could follow that train of thought any further, drawing my attention to a chattering noise of some sort.

"Hold on; busy," the Doctor said, his attention still on the phone.

"There was a noise," Christina began, as I glanced anxiously at our surroundings for some clue as to the source of that sound. "Like a sort of..."

She stopped as she turned around, prompting me to do the same, my eyes automatically widening in shock at the sight approaching us from a nearby dune.

In appearance, the main body appeared to be relatively normal by human standards, dressed in an outfit that reminded me of a grey school janitor's uniform, but the hands and head that came into clear view as it came closer made it clear that it was anything but human; not only did the thing only have three thick grey fingers on each hand, buts its head looked for all the world like a massive fly's head (Fortunately, it didn't look like that thing in the _Fly_ movies; I'd seen those once when I was younger and Renee's current boyfriend had left the videos lying around during one of his visits, and 'Brundlefly' had given me nightmares for weeks).

"Christina, Bella, don't move," the Doctor said, turning to look at the creature as he glanced warningly at both of us before raising his hands in a placating gesture as the creature in front of us aggressively chirped at us while pointing some kind of blaster in our direction, the Doctor responding with similar chirps as I moved to stand on his right while Christina remained on his left, our hands all raised.

"That's wait," he said, looking between Christina and I after he'd finished chirping. "I shout wait, and people usually wait."

"You speak the language?" Christina asked, looking at the Doctor in surprise.

"Every language," the Doctor muttered, turning his attention back to the fly-man in front of us as they exchanged further chirps. "That's begging for mercy."

In response, the creature chirped at us once again and waved the blaster in a particular direction.

"That means 'move'!" Christina said.

"You're learning," the Doctor said, as the three of us turned to walk in the direction that the creature had indicated, Christina moving into the lead as the Doctor and I took up position between her and the creature.

"Uh..." I said after we'd been walking for a few moments, turning to look awkwardly at the Doctor. "I know that it might be nothing..."

"Never stop asking questions, Bella; I always admire someone who isn't afraid to ask questions, so long as they don't ask them at inopportune moments," the Doctor said, smiling reassuringly at me. "What's the problem?"

"Well, I... I didn't understand it," I said, looking uncertainly at him, wondering if I was about to say something that the Doctor would interpret as a stupid or a clever comment, indicating the creature behind us with a brief wave of my hand. "I always understood what the Daleks or the Hroth were saying, and they were... well, looking back, I don't exactly see a race as xenophobic as the Daleks speaking anything but their own language... but...?"

"Oh, you're wondering why you couldn't understand _him_?" the Doctor said, smiling in approval at me as he indicated the fly-alien. "Nice bit of reasoning, but it's really fairly straightforward; the TARDIS normally translates for you- and once you've been exposed long enough you'll be able to understand most languages for good even without it-, but this early in your time with me, we're too far out of range and the vocal pattern this race uses is a bit too complicated for you to process it without the TARDIS anyway, given that you couldn't really accurately duplicate the language on your own; I'll get a bit of a sore throat if I have to speak it too much myself."

"Ah," I said, nodding in understanding; at least that explained why the Daleks had spoken such good English...

"Hold on a minute," I said, looking sharply at the Doctor as another thought occurred to me; I'd never thought of myself as a deductive genius, but if I'd picked up on the fact that the Cullens weren't entirely human without any pre-existing ideas that such a thing was even possible, I couldn't be _that_ stupid. "How come I didn't think about that earlier?"

"Oh, a side-effect of the translation matrix is that it slightly rewires your subconscious mind so that you don't consciously register that you shouldn't be able to understand what you're hearing unless your mind is slightly off-centre- one of my old companions was hypnotised at one point and another drank some rather powerful champagne, for example- or in situations like we're in now, where we're cut off from the ship," the Doctor explained, his tone relatively casual even as I couldn't stop myself staring at him incredulously.

"The TARDIS... _rewired my mind_?" I repeated; if we hadn't been stuck on another planet, I would probably have started running back to Forks right then. The idea that someone I'd trusted had done... _that_... to me...

"It's just a minor tweak- saves me worrying about answering all kinds of questions or acting as a go-between if we run into trouble or you wander off-, and it's had _no_ other effects on you whatsoever, I assure you," the Doctor said, looking at me with an expression that I didn't need Jasper's abilities to know practically radiated honesty. "Bella, I'm sorry I didn't mention it earlier, but I honestly didn't think it mattered; I _promise_ you that it's just an automatic feature of the TARDIS that does nothing more than help you understand languages more easily and quickly than you would if you were left to figure out what you were listening to on your own."

For a moment I simply glared at the Doctor, turning over everything that he'd just told me as I tried to work out how I should feel about it, but eventually I gave up the glare and settled for a slight smile; whatever else he'd done, I could at least be fairly sure that the Doctor wouldn't do anything to _hurt_ me.

"Just so long as there isn't anything _else_ you should be telling me about what that ship does to me..." I said, my eyes narrowing as I spoke to make sure the Doctor understood the point I wanted to make.

"If it does anything else, I don't even know about it," the Doctor replied with a firm nod.

I decided that I'd just have to accept that and made a mental note to try and ignore the issue in future; it was slightly disturbing to realise that the TARDIS had 'tweaked' my mind, but given that it hadn't been anything major that had been altered there really wasn't that much to make a fuss about...

For a moment, I wondered how I could be so comfortable about the TARDIS doing that to my mind when I'd always been so concerned about Edward reading mine, but swiftly concluded that it wasn't the same thing; the TARDIS was just helping me out so that I could more easily enjoy my travels, but what Edward's power could have done was a _serious_ violation of my privacy...

"So, if the TARDIS does the translation, how come you could understand that thing?" I asked at last, indicating the creature, trying to find something else to think about that didn't involve my ex.

"I've got some experience with languages I can draw on despite the TARDIS's absence, but that only takes me so far; there's a few languages out there that were just so old and so limited in their use- never got beyond a certain area in a certain planet, things like that- that I never got around to learning them myself, and then there's those races who don't 'speak' the way we do..." the Doctor explained, shrugging slightly at me.

"Like what?" I asked curiously, my initial anger now forgotten with this new information to consider.

"Well, I did have a rather interesting run-in once with an insectoid race who communicated entirely by smell," the Doctor said, smiling slightly at me and nearly making me miss the slightly haunted edge to his eyes as he spoke, as though something else had happened during that encounter, before he shook it off and smiled at me. " _Very_ complicated language, let me tell you; you've got to watch what you say because meaning and context is a lot more important than it is when you're just dealing with a spoken language..."

Conversation stopped as the four of us walked over another dune and found ourselves within visual range of what could only be a massive spaceship. Apparently the size of a jumbo jet, the ship was made of black metal, split in half by a massive crack and partly buried in the sand. From what I could see the intact ship looked like it would have resembled a long-necked fly that had landed on the ground- there was what looked like an 'eye' on one end and the larger portion of the ship had a smooth surface that reminded me of a fly's folded wings-, but there was no way to be sure given the extent of the damage that it had suffered.

"Could these... fly things be responsible for us being here?" Christina asked, walking back slightly so that she could address us more directly; I guessed that she'd been waiting for us to finish talking before butting in herself.

"No," the Doctor said, shaking his head even as the three of us continued to walk into the ship, our 'captor' close behind us. "Look at the ship, it's a wreck. They crashed, just like us."

I wasn't sure how to feel about that; the idea of having assistance in our efforts to get off this planet was nice- assuming we could establish what these fly-things wanted-, but the thought that we were up against something that could make the ship in front of us crash when all we had to contribute was a bus and the Doctor was _not_ an encouraging one, no matter how much faith I had in my friend...

As we walked through the corridors of the alien ship after entering via a side-door that had probably been an airlock of some sort when the ship was intact, I wondered whether I should feel impressed or disappointed. While the ship looked impressive on the outside, inside it was in far poorer shape than the _Wayfarer_ had been, cables and wires hanging down around us and pipes rattling around the side with the occasional burst of steam, and no amount of self-persuasion that I was hardly seeing it at its best was enough to get me past the personal frustration that I couldn't even visit a _decent_ alien ship...

I wasn't sure what was weirder right now; that I was on an alien ship on a distant planet, or that I had reached a point where I felt 'comfortable'- to a certain degree, anyway- complaining about the relatively poor condition that it was in.

"This place is _freezing_!" Christina said, shivering slightly as we continued to walk through the corridors, the cracked floor only occasionally illuminated by sunlight through the outer hull.

"The hull's made of Photafine Steel; turns cold when it's hot," the Doctor explained.

"And vice-versa?" I asked, shivering slightly at the anomaly of cold air in a desert at daylight; the temperature might not have been comfortable outside, but it had still been a lot more tolerable than the cold we were experiencing in here.

"Pretty much, yeah; makes it ideal for spaceships, but relatively poor in this kind of situation," the Doctor said, nodding at me in approval before he resumed his study of the surrounding ship as we walked. "Beautiful bit of work, though; intact, it must have been an incredible deep-spacer..."

Given the seemingly random assortment of components on the TARDIS console, I wasn't entirely surprised at the Doctor's approval of another ship that looked like it still needed some work done on it, but I was spared hearing more of his thoughts on that topic when we walked through another door and found ourselves in what could only be the ship's control room; the large amount of consoles spread out in front of us certainly gave that impression, along with the windows above them. There was also a second member of the fly-headed race in the room, wearing a similar tunic to the one his counterpart had worn, although his clothing had a slightly more elaborate insignia on his shoulder. After exchanging chirps with his crewmate, he took a device from the wall, pinned it to his chest and turned it on before chirping at us, a purple light now illuminating from the device.

"Oh, right, good, yes, hello!" the Doctor said, smiling in relief before he turned to whisper to Christina and I. "That's a telepathic translator; he can understand us."

"Still sounds like gibberish to me," Christina said as the new alien said something to us again.

"That's what I said; he can understand us," the Doctor clarified, looking at Christina with a pointed expression that suggested she should have realised what he'd just told her. "Doesn't work the other way round."

I briefly wondered how many races had developed the kind of two-way translator that the TARDIS possessed, but that thought had to be pushed aside as the Doctor turned his attention back to the new alien who I was starting to assume was the ship's captain as the creature in question chirped away at the Doctor.

"You will suffer for your crimes..." the Doctor translated, his tone somehow remarkably casual despite the obviously threatening nature of the Tritovores' speech (I decided not to wonder how a race that must have evolved from insects could have a body language that I could understand; this wasn't the time for those kind of questions). "You have... committed an act of violence against the Tritovore race- Tritovores, they're called Tritovores!- you came here in the 200 to destroy us... sorry, what's the 200?"

"It's the bus," Christina clarified, as the Doctor leaned forward to more directly question the Tritovores. "Number 200; they mean the bus."

"Ah... actually," I said, looking awkwardly at the two Tritovores- I might not be the 'boss' in this situation, but I'd spent enough time taking a back seat back in Forks and I wasn't going to continue that now-, "sorry to argue with you, but you're making a mistake; we got pulled through that wormhole by accident."

"You're just doing what Christina did earlier- I'm the Doctor, by the way; this is my friend Bella, and this is Christina, the Honourable Lady Christina; at least I hope she's honourable-; the 200 doesn't look like that normally," the Doctor said, indicating each of us before he continued speaking. "Anyway, the 200's broken, just the same as you!"

The Tritovore who'd discovered us originally chirped briefly at the captain, who responded with a chirp of his own before they both lowered their guns.

"What are they doing?" Christina asked uncertainly.

"They believe me," the Doctor said casually.

"It's that simple?" I asked, looking sceptically at my friend; after my past experience with stand-offs, I would have expected a longer argument to convince the Tritovores of anything.

"I've got a very honest face," the Doctor said, nodding slightly as he conceded another piece of information to us. "And the translator says I'm telling the truth. Plus the face!"

Despite the severity of our situation, I allowed myself a brief smile at that comment; for a man who used technology so much, the Doctor clearly didn't like it when technology was more 'important' than faith in each other.

"Right!" the Doctor said, addressing the Tritovores directly even as he walked over to examine another console. "So! First things first, there's a very strange storm heading our way, can you send out a probe?"

The resulting chirps sounded the same as usual apart from being slightly slower, but I could have sworn that there was a slight apology in the Tritovore's stance as it responded to the Doctor.

"Ah, they've lost power; hold on..." the Doctor said, examining the control console and the connecting wires for a moment before he placed his hand on a large knob on the front. "The crash knocked the mainline crystallography out of synch, but if I can jiggle it _back_ -"

After a quick kick from the Time Lord, the console lit up, prompting a relieved smile from Christina and I.

"I thank you!" the Doctor said, turning to look at the Tritovores, smiling as one of them chirped at him.

"Yes I am!" he said, in response to whatever the Tritovore had said. "Frequently. Okey doke, let's launch that probe!"

With that, he flicked a few switches before he slammed one hand down on a lever, leaving Christina and I to look at each other with slightly exasperated smiles at his usual casual cockiness before the Doctor turned back to look at the Tritovores.

"Now then," he said, joviality forgotten as he looked at our current 'hosts', "start at the beginning; where exactly _are_ we?"


	7. The Biological Swarm

As I stared at the holographic orange-and-blue 'cloud' on the holographic display in front of us, surrounded by unfamiliar stars and constellations as the cloud itself appeared to envelop the solar system that we were currently in, I was briefly reminded of the Kurgon Wonder that the Doctor had shown me during one of our earliest trips together, but pushed that aside; this one might be more contained than the scale of the Kurgon Wonder, but the fact that it apparently held a _living_ planet, rather than the memorial that the Kurgon Wonder had been, made it all the more beautiful because of that.

"The Scorpion Nebula," the Doctor said reflectively, as we sat beneath the projection and stared at it. "We're on the other side of the universe."

He glanced over at Christina with a slight smile. "Just what you wanted; so far away..."

As we watched the projection, the image focused on a lush green planet somewhere in the centre of the nebula, the resulting world vaguely resembling Earth with larger continents in some areas.

"The planet of... San Helios," the Doctor said; I wondered how he'd determined that, but concluding that it wasn't worth asking as he'd come up with some complicated process of elimination that I might not have understood anyway.

"And that's us?" Christina asked, pointing at the holographic planet in awe. "We're on another world..."

"We have been for a while now; didn't you see the extra suns?" I pointed out, looking over at her where she sat on the opposite side of the Doctor from me.

"I know, but seeing it like that..." Christina said, a smile on her face that was more honest than anything I felt I'd seen from her before now.

"Good, isn't it?" the Doctor said with a slight smile at her reaction.

"Wonderful," Christina said, before one of the Tritovores began to chirp again, prompting the Doctor to resume his translation attempts for our benefit.

"The Tritovores were going to trade with San Helios," he explained in a low voice. "Population of one hundred billion, plenty of waste matter for them to absorb."

"Uh... when you say 'waste matter'...?" I began, looking awkwardly at the aliens I was starting to consider our 'allies' even if I didn't know what we were allied against.

"They feed off what others leave behind," the Doctor confirmed with an awkward nod. "From... their behind. If you see what I mean. Perfectly natural; they are flies!"

Despite my recognition of the fact that the Doctor had a good point- and my own experience of the Cullens; at least the Tritovores' unusual dietary requirements didn't require them to kill people-, that didn't stop me shuddering slightly at the thought of a sentient race that actually ate literal _crap_.

I might not have agreed with Christina's wording when she reflected that she wouldn't want to kiss the Tritovores- even if they probably wouldn't be interested in a kiss from her, there was no need for Christina to be rube to people who might be our only source of assistance-, but I _definitely_ agreed with the sentiment; I might have known that Edward drank blood, but it wasn't like it wasn't something that humans could eat themselves if they had to hunt animals themselves or something like that...

Thoughts of Christina's attitude were forgotten as the projection shifted to display a vast city, full of ziggurats and walkways, along with what looked like flying cars and some kind of... well, I could only call it a 'hovership'... interspaced with various trees.

"San Helios City," the Doctor said, looking at the hologram thoughtfully after the Tritovores had given another series of chirps that I assumed provided the name.

"That's amazing..." Christina said, before she turned to look at the Doctor more directly. "But... you've seen this sort of thing before, haven't you?"

"Thousands of times," the Doctor admitted, nodding over at me. "And Bella's been to more than a few interesting places herself, of course."

"That 'Lordship' of yours..." Christina asked, her expression becoming more contemplative as she studied him, even if the slightly eager smile never left her face. "The Lord of where, exactly?"

"Of Time," the Doctor replied, his expression surprisingly neutral as he revealed the answer to that question. "I come from a race of people called Time Lords."

For a moment, I couldn't help but feel jealous that the Doctor felt comfortable sharing something like that with a woman we'd only just met, but I quickly pushed that aside.

I might not like Christina, but I wasn't going to start trying to make the Doctor do what _I_ thought he should do; even when I'd wanted nothing more than to be with Edward, him constantly 'setting the pace' in our relationship, even if he'd thought that he was doing it for the right reasons, had become _extremely_ frustrating more than once...

"You're an alien?" Christina said, looking at him in surprise.

"Technically, _we're_ the aliens here, Christina," I pointed out, indicating the ship around us with a brief wave of my hand as I glared at the older woman. "I mean, we're in an alien ship on an alien planet; if you define alien as something from a world other than the one we're on, we're probably _all_ aliens right now."

"Right..." Christina said, her brief glare at me giving the impression that she didn't appreciate my attempt to correct her before she turned her attention back to the projection. "So... if that's San Helios, then all we need to do is find that city and they can help us?"

"I don't think it's that simple..." the Doctor said, glancing over at the Tritovore captain, who operated a switch and changed the projection to show the desert that was currently surrounding us. "We're in the city. Right now."

"...What?" I said, blinking in shock as I looked over at the Doctor, wishing that he was the type of person to make a joke even as I knew the Doctor would never joke about death on the kind of scale he'd just implied.

"But it's sand," Christina asked, clearly just as confused about what the Doctor had said as I was. "That first image, the temples and things, what's that, then? Ancient history?"

"The image was taken last year," the Doctor said, after the Tritovore captain had chirped a response.

"What could reduce an entire city to a desert in a year?" I asked, trying to focus on the questions rather than the implications of that fact; the idea that we'd been walking in what were essentially people's ashes was _not_ pleasant...

"I said there was something in the sand..." the Doctor said reflectively, picking up a small handful of sand from the floor of the ship and allowing it to trickle back down to the floor. "The city, the oceans, the mountains... the wildlife... and a hundred billion people, turned to sand. All those voices in Carmen's head... she's hearing them die."

"But I've got _sand_ in my hair..." Christina said, as she suddenly began to urgently brush her hair while the Doctor stared thoughtfully at the projection, evidently trying to work out if anything he had encountered could do something like this. "That's dead people! Oh! That's disgusting!"

"Excuse me?" I said, turning to glare at the older woman; with the best will in the world, what she'd just said made it _very_ hard to feel charitable towards her. "Something just destroyed the whole of this planet, and you're worried about your _hair_?"

Christina and I were saved from continuing this conversation when the Doctor's borrowed mobile phone rang, the Time Lord's urgent response to the ringing temporarily distracting us both from the argument that we'd been about to have.

"Malcolm," he said grimly, his attention focused on the matter at hand as though he hadn't even heard my near-argument with Christina (Not that I could blame him; this wasn't the time to worry about things like that). "Tell me the bad news."

After listening to the person on the other end of the line for a few moments, the Doctor spoke again. "How can it get bigger by itself?"

I didn't need to spend much time thinking to realise what he had to be referring to; if he was talking to that UNIT scientist back on Earth, he could only mean that the wormhole that had brought us here was growing larger, which just raised _far_ too many questions about what was generating that wormhole and what it wanted with Earth that meant it had to be larger than it was...

"Good work, both of you!" the Doctor said, before a beep from the phone drew his attention to something else. "Oh, sorry, call waiting, got to go!"

Pulling the phone away for a moment, the Doctor switched to another line and held it back to his ear, his expression becoming increasingly grim as he listened to whatever the new speaker- probably from the bus- had to say, only briefly asking what had happened before he fell silent, his eyes staring off at nothing in particular as he processed what he'd just heard.

"What/s wrong?" I asked, looking apprehensively at my friend. "What's happened?"

Whatever the Doctor would have said was cut off as he terminated the phone call just at one of the ship's consoles beeped, the affirming chirp as the Tritovores studied the console all I needed to know that something else had happened.

"Is that something about the probe?" I asked, as the Doctor looked at the Tritovores with a slight tension in his shoulders.

"Yes," the Time Lord said grimly. "It's reached the storm."

"And what's he saying?" Christina asked after another series of chirps from the Tritovores.

"...That it's not a storm," the Doctor finished, looking grimly between us before he turned his attention back to the projection, which now showed the probe approaching what had to be the 'storm' we'd seen earlier, with the gleaming particles I noticed earlier now clearly identifiable as large creatures of some kind. They might be obviously flying, but they were shaped like giant metal stingrays rather than birds, moving through the air with a bizarre flying-swimming combo, their skin shining like it was-

"Are those things... metal?" I said, looking uncertainly between the Doctor and the holographic display; if it hadn't been for my previous encounters with the Cullens and other vampires giving me a chance to see how their skin- if you could call it that given that it was so hard- reacted to sunlight, the thought might have never occurred to me.

"Looks like it," the Doctor said, nodding grimly at my assessment.

"It's a swarm," Christina said, staring in obvious horror at the sight. "Millions of them."

"Billions," the Doctor corrected grimly, before the probe's transmission cut short as one of the creatures charged towards it, its mouth opening in a manner that made it obvious what was about to take place before we lost the image.

"We've lost the probe," the Doctor said grimly, standing up as the screen shifted to static. "It got eaten. Everything on this planet gets eaten."

"How far away is that swarm?" Christina asked.

"Hundred miles," the Doctor responded (Whether the probe had revealed that information or he'd calculated it himself was something else I saw no point in asking about). "But at that speed, it'll be here in twenty minutes."

One of the Tritovores chirped again, looking at the Doctor in a manner that I was fairly sure was apprehensive; they might not have faces, but they could be surprisingly expressive despite that.

"No, they're not just coming for us," the Doctor said, shaking his head briefly at the captain. "They want the wormhole."

"They're heading for Earth!" Christina said, she and I quickly realising what the Doctor was thinking; if these things had eaten San Helios that quickly, what would happen if they reached Earth?

"Show the analysis," the Doctor said, one of the Tritovores activating a projection of one of the stingrays in response to the Doctor's request, allowing my strange friend to study it for a few moments- the front part being fairly smooth while the back and tail displayed a ridged pattern that put me in mind of an insect's exoskeleton, along with the membrane-like 'wings'- before he continued to speak. "Incredible... they swarm out of a wormhole, strip the planet bare, then move on to the next world, start the life cycle all over again."

"So... they make the wormholes?" Christina asked; while I noted the uncertainty in her voice, I couldn't blame her need for clarification after receiving news like that.

"They must do," the Doctor said grimly.

"But how?" Christina asked, looking in confusion at the projection. "They don't exactly look like technicians."

"And if they _did_ create the wormhole, why are they so far away from it?" I added.

"Because..." the Doctor began, clasping his hands in front of his face and tapping his forefingers thoughtfully against each other before inspiration finally struck him. " _Got it_!"

"What?" I asked, smiling at the Doctor's new enthusiasm; if he was this enthusiastic about something, it boded well for the possibility that he was going to be able to solve whatever was happening right now.

"D'you see?" the Doctor said, raising his right hand to make various emphasising gestures as he explained his latest theory. "Billions of them, flying in formation, all the way round the planet, faster and faster and faster, round and round and round, till they generate a rupture in space! The speed of them, and the numbers, and the size - all of that rips the wormhole into existence!"

"And the wormhole's getting bigger-" Christina began.

"Because _they're_ getting closer..." I finished, swallowing as I looked at the screen that had been displaying the creatures earlier.

I'd faced the prospect of my own death for feeding purposes when James and Laurent had tried to kill me, but the knowledge that we were up against something that could eat the entire _planet_...

"That's why they're... metallic, right?" I asked, indicating the screen uncertainly (I was really surprisingly grateful to the Cullens for this; if it hadn't been for their example that not every living creature had to have 'skin' as I understood it, I might not have jumped to this conclusion so quickly). "It helps them survive the wormhole?"

"Exactly!" the Doctor said, grinning in approval at me. "They eat metal and extrude it into the exoskeleton; their velocity _makes_ the wormhole, and their bodies make it safe for them! Perfect design!"

"So... once we get back through the wormhole, we've got to close it?" I said, looking at the Doctor with sudden uncertainty. "How do we do that?"

"Well, if I've understood what equipment Malcolm's using, he _should_ have what we need..." the Doctor began, before he sighed in frustration as he looked at the phone in his hand. "But, unfortunately, the bus is out of fuel."

" _What_?" I said, my eyes widening in horror at this news.

My entire planet was going to be eaten down to a desert if we couldn't get that bus working to take us home, and we were going to be stopped because we were out of _fuel_?

"Look," the Doctor said, turning to look urgently at the Tritovores, "we can get off this planet- and get you off as well, obviously-, but we need diesel for the bus, the 200; it's a mineral refined from rocks, have you got any sort of engine fuel I could have a look at?"

The subsequent chirps didn't sound positive, and the Doctor's sullen expression reinforced it for me even before he started speaking. "It's no good, they use dryfilaments; not a drop of petrol!"

"Except you're missing the obvious," Christina said, looking over at him with a slight smile. "We came here through the wormhole, yes? But our Tritovore friends didn't. They came here to trade with San Helios. Therefore, the question is: why did they crash?"

I could have kicked myself for missing the obvious; after I'd worked out what Edward and the Cullens were on such minimal evidence, how could I have become so slow as to miss an anomaly like that?"

"Good question!" the Doctor said, smiling at Christina before he turned to look at the Tritovores once more. "Like she said, why did you crash?"


	8. Recovering the Crystal

As we hurried into another chamber, I wasn't sure what I expected to find, but the hole in the middle of the room appeared to be important even without the fact that this room had far less sand on the floor taken into account; it might clearly be old, judging by the worn nature of the metal around us, but nobody would keep a room particularly clean in a ship in this kind of state unless there was a reason for it.

"Oh yes," the Doctor said, indicating the deep metal pit with sides that seemed to be covered with all kinds of pipes running down to a bottom that I could only just see, faintly illuminated by various lights on all sides. "Gravity Well, look; goes all the way down to the engine."

"So... what happened to it?" I asked, looking uncertainly at the Tritovores for an answer, receiving the now-expected unintelligible chirps (I _really_ needed to stop expecting an answer from them; I'd grown too used to being able to understand everything).

"He says the drive system stalled," the Doctor translated for us. "Ten miles up, they fell out of the sky. But what caused that?"

I didn't need to understand the chirping from the Tritovore captain to know that the shrug he gave the Doctor meant that he didn't have an answer to that question, even if Christina responded to it before I could.

"But wait a minute..." the Doctor said, waving off Christina's comment as he looked down into the pit once again, pointing sharply at the Tritovore. "That's a crystal nucleus down there, yes?"

The Doctor's smile at the Tritovore's chirped response was all I needed to know that things were finally starting to turn in our favour.

"And it looks like it survived the crash," he said, walking around the well with a satisfied-yet-stunned expression on his face, as though he couldn't believe the lucky break we'd just had. "If the Crystal's intact... Oh yes, that's better than diesel!"

"You're going to use the Crystal as a new fuel source?" I said, looking uncertainly at my friend.

"Basically, anyway," the Time Lord confirmed with a shrug that I recognised as the Doctor's attempt to avoid discussing something complicated at the immediate moment, glancing around the ship as he continued speaking. "The spaceship's a write-off, but the 200's small enough..."

"How does a crystal drive a bus?" Christina asked.

"In a super-clever outer-spacey way; just trust me!" the Doctor said, hurrying over to a nearby monitor on the side of the well, tapping a few controls before he indicated the image that was now displayed on the screen, which showed a fist-sized crystal that put me in mind of a glowing diamond held in place on the ground by four metal clamps. "Look; that's the crystal. Have you got access shafts?"

I wondered where the Doctor was going with that request for only a moment before the Tritovore captain replied with a shake of his head and the Doctor sighed. "All frozen... maybe I can open them."

With that, he grabbed two small devices from the wall, tossing one over to Christina while putting the other one on himself (What a race like the Tritovores were doing with devices that could be used by humans was something I didn't get, but this wasn't the time to worry about things like that).

"Internal coms," the Doctor explained to Christina, "put that on; you stay here, keep an eye on the shaft, tell me if anything happens-"

With those instructions, he rushed out of the room, the Tritovore close behind him, leaving Christina and I standing there for a moment, looking at each other out of a lack of anything else to do, before I shrugged and ran after him; Christina might be human, but so far that seemed to be all we really had in common, and I didn't feel like sticking around to try and awkwardly make conversation when she already had something to do.

After a few moments of running, I found myself back in the control room, where the Doctor was running from panel to panel as the Tritovores watched.

"If I can use that sunlight to start the automatic maintenance..." the Doctor muttered, before he activated the earpiece-like thing. "Christina? If you see a panel opening, in the shaft, let me know."

I assumed that Christina had replied at the other end of the line, because the Doctor before continuing to try various switches, pausing only briefly to ask if anything had happened at Christina's end before turning his attention back to his current task, connecting various cables up to what I assumed was the Tritovore equivalent of an adapter.

"Any sign of movement?" he asked after more switches had been flicked, although his response of adjusting more controls made it clear that he wasn't receiving the answer he wanted yet (I briefly wondered how many cables he could actually attach to that thing before it overloaded, but decided that asking about it wouldn't get me anywhere; the Doctor knew probably what he was doing, after all).

I couldn't believe this; the Doctor finally seemed to have an idea to get us out of this mess, and he couldn't do it because he couldn't find the appropriate controls-

"Why, what d'you mean?" he suddenly said, his expression suggesting that he'd just heard something worrying on the other end of the communication device as he looked up from his work. "Christina...?"

Before I had time to ask him what had happened, my friend had turned around and was running down the corridor back towards where we'd left Christina, leaving me to follow them just in time to see Christina, wearing a harness attached to some kind of winch just above the well, standing on the side of the pit.

"The aristocracy survives for a reason," I just heard Christina say as the Doctor and I reached the door, pausing to look back at us with a smile before she turned back to face the well. "We're ready for anything."

"No-!" the Doctor began to yell, just as Christina dived head-first into the well, the wires she'd attached to herself keeping her linked to the winch as she hurtled downwards. I barely had time to take in what was happening- the idea of a _lady_ doing something like this seemed so ridiculous it felt like, to quote a book I'd read in a library once, the idea of the Suez Crisis having a snack; the concepts just didn't seem to go together- before the Doctor had aimed the sonic screwdriver at the winch, prompting me to glance down just in time to see Christina come to a halt.

" _That's_ better!" the Doctor said, stepping back from the well as I heard Christina's voice say something over the communication device; it was just the two of us in the room at the moment, but I was slightly too far away from the Doctor to clearly hear what she had said to him.

"You were just about to hit the security grid," the Doctor said, looking impatiently down into the well as one of the Tritovores looked curiously between us. "Look!"

Glancing into the pit, I winced at the vague glimpse of blue energy around where Christina currently hung; I wasn't an expert when it came to technology, but that didn't look like it could be healthy for anything.

"Try the big red button," the Doctor said in a slightly sarcastic tone, the motion Christina's silhouette made in the shaft before the blue energy vanished reminding me that the Doctor was still talking to Christina over that communication device; he must have told her how to deactivate the system.

"Now come back up!" the Doctor yelled, as I moved over to stand beside him; if I listened carefully, I could probably just make out what Christina was saying to him. "I can do that."

" _Oh, don't you wish_?" Christina replied- it was a little hard to hear her, but her accent was at least fairly clear-, before the winch started to lower her down the shaft once again.

"Slowly!" the Doctor yelled after her.

" _Yes, sir_ ," Christina replied as she continued her descent, leaving the Doctor and I to sit down beside the shaft and wait for her to complete her descent.

"Quite the mystery, aren't you?" the Doctor noted, as he stared down at the well before us. "Lady Christina de Souza. Carrying a winch in her bag."

" _No stranger than you, spaceman_ ," Christina replied, prompting a wistful expression to appear on the Doctor's face.

"I had this friend, once," he said, regret subtle in his tone even if it was almost obvious on his face; I didn't think he was talking about 'Rose'- this expression reminded me more of the look on my face when I thought about Alice, as though he was missing a sibling rather than a lover-, but I did have to wonder who he was thinking about instead. "She called me spaceman."

" _And was she right_?" Christina asked. " _Do you zoom about the place in a rocket_?"

"Well, a little blue box," the Doctor said, reaching over to examine Christina's nearby bag, a contemplative expression on his face as he studied the bag while continuing to speak. "Travels in more than space. It can journey through time, Christina. Ohh, the places I've been. World War One. Creation of the universe, end of the universe, the war between China and Japan. And the Court of King Athelstan, in 924 AD..."

As he spoke, he lifted a large golden two-handled cup out of the bag, about the size of a large bowl, leaving me wondering if he'd mentioned the time-travel part of the TARDIS's capabilities just so that he could lead the conversation neatly into this moment; the Doctor might appear random at times, but, like someone had commented in that _Pirates of the Caribbean_ film- I didn't really think it had been as bad as some critics claimed-, even his random actions seemed to work towards a final plan.

"But I don't remember you being there," the Doctor said, staring at the cup in a thoughtful manner. "So what are you doing with this?"

" _Excuse me_ ," Christina said, sounding honestly insulted. " _A gentleman never goes through a lady's possessions_."

"Trust me, Christina; the Doctor may be a Lord, but he's no gentleman," I said, leaning in so that the earpiece could pick up my voice, smiling slightly at my friend to show that no insult was intended by my words before I looked more curiously at the cup. "What is that, anyway?"

"It's the Cup of Athelstan, given to the first King of Britain, as a coronation gift from Hywel, King of the Welsh," the Doctor explained, turning the cup thoughtfully in his hands. "But it's been held in the International Gallery for 200 years, which makes _you_ , Lady Christina... a thief."

" _I like to think I liberated it_ ," Christina replied casually.

"Don't tell me you need the money," the Doctor said (I had to agree with that question; in my experience, titles and wealth generally went together).

" _Daddy lost everything investing his fortune in the Icelandic banks_ ," Christina replied (I wondered what that was referring to before I remembered that it was probably something to do with future history- from what I'd seen we were currently only a few years after the date I'd left with the Doctor- and decided not to ask any more questions; I probably couldn't do anything to impact the future, but the Doctor's speech about the dangers of changing history during our meeting with the Daleks wasn't something I'd forget easily).

"No no no, if you're short of cash, you rob a bank," the Doctor said, a slight smile on his face as he looked at the cup in his hands. "Stealing this... that's a lifestyle."

" _I take it you disapprove_?" Christina asked.

"Absolutely," the Doctor said, before he assumed a more contemplative expression. "Except... that little blue box? I stole it. From my own people."

Even Christina's subsequent comment about how that news showed that she and the Doctor were quite a team couldn't distract me from the surprise of my current train of thought- here I was, daughter of the Forks chief of police, and I was spending time with someone who'd stolen an ancient artefact from a gallery and travelling with a man who'd stolen his main means of transport-, but thoughts on the potential legality of my friend and acquaintance's actions were forgotten when a strange sound, resembling a metallic combination of a roar and a hiss, resounded through the ship.

" _What the blazes was that_?" Christina said, as the Doctor put the cup back into the bag and stood up, an urgent expression on his face.

"We never did find out why the ship crashed," the Doctor said, in a tone of voice that suggested that the worst-case answer to that question wasn't one I wanted to know. "Christina, I think you should come back up."

" _Too late_ ," Christina replied urgently. " _I can see it_."

"Careful. Slowly," the Doctor said- clearly, if Christina could see it, then we were already pretty much committed to the task at hand-, before he quickly turned to address the Tritovore captain. "Have you got an open-vent system?"

The responding chirps sounded worrying to me even before I took in the Doctor's grim expression.

"I thought so," he said grimly.

"What does that mean?" I asked, only vaguely hearing Christina ask the same question.

"It's like when birds fly into the engines of an aircraft," the Doctor began to explain, only for the subsequent second howl to answer the question for me before the Doctor could say it himself.

One of the stingrays we'd seen flying around earlier was _in_ the ship...

"Got trapped in the vents; caused the crash," the Doctor said, confirming my assessment before I could even voice it, standing up and looking at the winch as he pulled out his sonic screwdriver. "Christina, _get out_."

" _It's not moving_ ," I heard Christina reply over the commlink as I moved closer to the Doctor once again. " _I think it's injured_ -"

"It's dormant, because it's so cold down there," the Doctor countered. "But your body heat is raising the temperature."

" _I tend to have that effect_ ," Christina replied with a casual flirtatious tone to her voice that I could never have pulled off even if I wasn't facing a potentially deadly situation like she was now. " _Almost there_..."

"Not just the Crystal," the Doctor said, clearly recognising that he wasn't going to stop Christina completing her self-assigned mission. "I need the whole bed, the plate-thing."

After a tense few moments of silence, alarms began to sound and the Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver at the winch- I vaguely heard Christina say something, but there was barely time to register her exact words before the screwdriver activated again-, the cable retracting so fast that it almost reminded me of the view I'd seen when Edward had carried me on his back, the image practically blurring as the Doctor muttered encouragement at the machinery. Glancing down, I noticed Christina activate the energy shield that she'd nearly hit earlier just in time for the field to 'catch' the stingray, leaving it shuddering and screaming half-way up as Christina continued to hurtle towards us.

"Oh, she's good!" the Doctor said, glancing down the well at Christina's rapidly-approaching form just before she emerged from the Well, the Doctor grabbing her while the Tritovore took the large yellow crystal and the metal clamps attached to it that Christina had been holding in her hands.

"Come on!" I yelled, indicating the cabin where the other Tritovore was waiting for us as the Doctor grinned in a congratulatory manner at Christina. "In case you're forgetting, we're still about to be attacked by that swarm!"

"Good point, well made; _move_!" the Doctor yelled, hurrying back towards the control room, Christina barely pausing to grab her backpack as we followed him.

"Commander!" the Doctor said, looking urgently at the two Tritovores as they examined a control console. "Mission complete! Now we've got to get back to the 200, all of us!"

After the Tritovore's chirped response, the Doctor shook his head. "Oh, don't be so daft, a captain _can_ leave his ship, if there's a busstanding by!"

The sudden jolt as the entire ship shook around us prevented me from voicing my own thoughts on that particular issue, even as the glance I exchanged with the Doctor was enough to confirm that the same worst-case scenario had occurred to both of us even before the subsequent howl made us sure that we were correct.

"More than one stingray?" I asked, looking anxiously at my friend.

"If they hit a swarm, there's no telling how many could be here; this ship's built like a metal sleeve, wouldn't be that hard for anything to get through the infrastructure..." the Doctor said, looking anxiously at the damaged hull around us.

"OK, forget going doing with your ship; you're coming with us!" I said, hurrying forward to grab the Tritovores by the wrists- if I focused on the sleeve rather than the flesh it wasn't that different to pulling humans along- before I turned around and began to run back down the corridor, the Doctor and Christina close behind me, my old clumsiness forgotten as the five of us raced towards whatever safety that the 200 had to offer in this situation.

I just hoped that whatever plan the Doctor had to use that crystal to move the bus would work; he might be a genius, but time was _not_ on our side right now, and I didn't want to have to deal with one of the Doctor's more last-minute plans with a whole swarm behind us...


	9. Back to Earth

As we finally came within range of the 200 bus that had brought us to this planet in the first place, I almost felt like crying in relief; the Swarm might have been apparently delayed by their desire to consume the ship- a part of me wondered if certain metals tasted better than others, but the rest of me was too busy panicking-, but at least now we knew that the time their delay had brought us would be useful.

"Where've you- what the-?" Nathan said, leaning out of the bus to greet me as I approached before he registered the presence of the Tritovores on either side of me as I ran up to the bus.

"No time to explain; just trust me that they're on our side and get them into the bus!" I said, practically shoving the Tritovores through the door before I hurried in myself to address the other passengers; I might not be a diplomat, but I wasn't about to start any kind of panic at a time like this, and I at least had some experience of non-humans interacting with humans (Even if the Cullens and the Quillettes had still been relatably human where it counted) to help us find a balance of some sort. "Everybody, these are the Tritovores; their ship crashed here a while back and the Doctor's taken some of their engine components to get this bus moving again!"

"Yes I did!" the Doctor said, smiling as he stepped into the bus after me, holding up the crystal and the attached clamps. "And here it is!"

"That crystal?" Barclay said, looking at the Doctor in confusion.

"Oh, the crystal's nothing; we don't need _that_ ," the Doctor said, removing the crystal from the metal struts holding it and tossing it to the side, although I managed to grab it and slip it into my pocket in a moment of hand-eye coordination that surprised even me; even if it was useless for our current purpose, it would still make an interesting souvenir.

"What we _needed_ ," the Doctor continued, holding up the clamps that had previously held the crystal in place, "were _these_!"

Christina barely had time to ask why before the Doctor had hurried back out of the bus, pulling one of the clamps away from its fellows to stick it onto the hubcap of the nearest tyre as though it were a large magnet, a slight 'buzz' sound as the clamps made contact the only thing to suggest that there was more to it than simple magnets. As I hurried out of the bus to follow him, I noticed the Doctor attaching another clamp to the other wheel on the door side of the bus, and quickly decided that it would be more practical to return to the bus at this point, the Doctor soon following me back inside the bus with the clamps now all attached to the bus's wheels.

"There we go!" he said, smiling as he settled down in the driver's seat, looking at me with a casual grin.

"So... the clamps do... what?" I asked him uncertainly; I could have asked the Tritovores, but given that I still couldn't understand them, the Doctor was my best chance at getting answers, and I had a feeling they wouldn't really know what the Doctor was trying to accomplish anyway given their obvious ignorance of how the bus worked. "Generate some kind of energy shield that can help the bus grip the ground?"

"Right in principle, wrong in practise; they _will_ help us move, but not like that, and I still need to fix this," the Doctor said, grinning at me before he turned his attention back to the steering-wheel as he slammed the remaining circular plate on top of the wheel in question before turning to Christina. "Have you got a hammer in that bag?"

As Christina passed the requested tool to him, the Doctor quickly began to hammer the plate onto the wheel, pausing only briefly to hand the mobile phone to me with hurried instructions to press redial, leaving me to obey the instructions and hold the phone to his ear.

"Malcolm; it's me!" the Doctor said, his voice focused on the current conversation even as his hands continued to work at the task in front of him.

" _I'm ready_!" Doctor Taylor's voice replied on the other end.

"Ready for what?" the Doctor asked, briefly confused at the response.

" _I don't know_!" Taylor replied. " _You tell me_!"

"I'm gonna try to get back," the Doctor explained, still working away at the task before him, "but listen, there might be something following us, you need to find a way to close the wormhole-"

" _Would that be a compressed burst of feedback on a counteroscillation, perchance_?" Doctor Taylor replied, a slight humour in his voice that suggested that he knew how the Doctor was going to respond to his question already.

"Oh, Malcolm!" the Doctor said, smiling in approval, "You're brilliant!"

" _Coming from you, sir, that means the world_!" Doctor Taylor replied; I might not know much about Doctor Taylor himself, but the thought that I was in the company of a man who could inspire that kind of compliment and gratitude from a government-employed scientist was somewhat satisfying.

And to think I'd once thought that becoming a vampire was the only way I'd ever make an impact on anything; I'd already helped to save the future from the Daleks, and that was only one specific trip...

"Sorry, gotta go!" the Doctor said, bringing my thoughts back to the present as he terminated the phone call, cursing as he stared at a series of loose wires linking the plate to the bus's dashboard.

"It's not compatible..." he groaned, sparks emerging from the wheel after his first attempt to turn it. "Bus, spaceship, spaceship, bus; I need to _weld_ the two systems together."

"With what?" I asked, ignoring the anxious chatters of the Tritovores; if they had actually thought that the 200 could travel to San Helios on its own, they probably couldn't contribute anything useful to the Doctor's latest conundrum.

"I need something non-corrosive," the Doctor said, rubbing his forehead thoughtfully with his hand. "Something malleable, something ductile, something... Gold."

"Oh, no, you don't," Christina said, tightening her grip on her bag as the Doctor sharply turned to look at her.

"This is _not_ the time to be quibbling about how much it's worth, Christina; I doubt we've got anything else with enough gold to do this job, so it's the cup or nothing," I said, waving a hand briefly at Barclay to indicate that he should stay down when he stood up and began to remove his watch; I may not have Alice's fashion sense, but I didn't spend those months as her best friend (Even if it hadn't apparently meant that much to her in the end) without developing an eye for some shopping details, and that watch was definitely not what Barclay thought it was.

Finally, after her brief attempt to stare the Doctor down failed before it could really begin- I had a feeling that the Doctor could have stared down Carlisle if he had to-, Christina sighed and removed the golden cup from her bag, handing it

"It's over a thousand years old," she said as she stared at the Doctor (Why she was saying that I didn't know; hadn't the Doctor _just_ told her that he'd been there when it had been given to its original owner?). "Worth eighteen million pounds. Promise me you'll be careful."

"I promise," the Doctor said, taking the cup in an almost reverential manner before proceeding to take a hammer to the cup with a brutal simplicity that was somehow funny even without the glare Christina shot at him as he did so; after some of the more complex things the Doctor had done since I'd met him, it was rather funny seeing him set out to solve a problem by hitting something.

"I hate you..." Christina muttered, as the Doctor tore parts of the cup away from the main body, slipping them into position around the steering wheel and the clamps, keeping the two components linked to each other and sorting the problem that had drawn his attention originally.

"This is your driver speaking!" the Doctor called back to the other passengers, as he settled more comfortably into the driver's seat. "Hold on tight!"

"What for?" Barclay asked.

"Just do as he says!" Christina and I yelled back at the passengers, for once in agreement, even if Christina still looked somewhat indignant at the Doctor taking 'charge' after her earlier attempt to assert her authority.

Ignoring anything that the others might have to say, the Doctor turned his attention to the bus's engine, revving the motor and muttering to the bus as though it were the TARDIS, until, with a sudden shudder, I glanced out of the window in time to see the bus _rise into the air away from the sand_.

"You are _so_ kidding me!" Barclay said, staring incredulously at the sight below us as the bus shook, the frame holding together despite the previously-sustained damage as we ascended into the air and began to turn to face the portal.

"We're _flying_?" Nathan said, clearly finding it hard to believe what was happening even after everything else we'd seen since coming here (It wasn't like I couldn't understand the problem, really; a flying bus was at least impossible on a level that we could understand rather than the greater impossibility of being on this planet in the first place), Lou seconding that opinion while Angela just commented on the miraculous nature of our current situation.

"Anti-gravity clamps!" the Doctor said, smiling back at Christina and I. "Didn't I say? Round we go!"

As we turned around to face the portal directly, I tried to ignore Carmen's warning about the approaching Swarm behind us; knowledge of just how much trouble we were in wasn't going to help us get through this wormhole any faster...

"Is this thing going to survive the journey back?" Christina asked, accompanied by the hopeful chirps of the Tritovores; evidently the 'mighty 200' didn't look as intimidating to them when up-close, but I couldn't tell if they were enjoying the ride or just excited at the possibility of getting away.

"Only one way to find out!" the Doctor replied, before he slammed his foot down on the accelerator. "Next stop-!"

" _Earth_!" Christina and I yelled simultaneously, exchanging brief grins before the bus zoomed forward, leaving us suddenly enveloped by the dimmed lights and roller-coaster-esque feeling of the wormhole that had brought us here; it actually seemed to be slightly more stable now, as though the anti-gravity clamps the Doctor was using were helping him maintain control-

That thought had no sooner crossed my mind than we had emerged from light into darkness, a glance behind and out of the window revealing what looked like the tunnel we'd been using before the wormhole originally caught us so long ago before we hurtled onwards into the sky...

"It's London!" Barclay said, grinning broadly at the sight before us, the Thames stretching out underneath us and Big Ben visible in the distance (There was something about Big Ben being the bell rather than the clocktower, but I wasn't concerned about that; the fact was that I could see a familiar landmark).

"We're back home!" Angela added, sounding almost on the verge of tears of joy at this new turn of events.

"He did it!" Nathan said, grinning over at the Doctor before he looked at me. "You did it!"

" _We_ did it," I said, enjoying the thrill of the moment as I looked at the people gathered around us.

Some of the passengers on this bus might have played minor parts compared to what some others had done, but we had all played some kind of role in preparing the bus for this return to Earth; Nathan, Barclay and I had helped to repair it, Angela had provided some food, Carmen had helped the Doctor realise what was happening, Lou had helped keep her calm and focused, Christina had recovered the clamps, the Tritovores had provided information about the creatures, the Doctor had kept us all fixed on our goal...

We hadn't always played big parts in the grand scheme, but, as that old poem 'For want of a nail' had reminded us, even small things could have a big impact on the future-

"Malcolm!" the Doctor yelled, bringing me back to the present as he spoke into the phone once more, one hand driving the bus while the other held the phone. "Close that wormhole!"

Those three simple words reminded me of the threat that still faced us; even if we'd made it back, if that wormhole wasn't closed my planet would face the same fate as San Helios, and that was _not_ a pleasant thought...

"He's hung up on me!" the Doctor said, the urgency of that statement reinforcing just how bad this situation was; given his evident respect for the Doctor, Doctor Taylor wouldn't have hunt up unless he had something _really_ important to occupy his attention at the other end, even if I had to wonder what could be keeping him so busy that he couldn't spare the time to reply...

"Malcolm! Listen to me!" the Doctor yelled, even as I glanced down to see about three stingrays- probably the fastest ones in the swam- flying away from the tunnel amid a barrage of gunfire; if they were here already, the main 'mass' of the swarm couldn't be far behind. "I need that signal; we've got billions of those things about to fly through!"

Whatever Doctor Taylor was about to do, he'd better do it fast...

"Loop it back through the integrator, then keep the signal ramping up!" the Doctor yelled, briefly pausing to listen to Doctor Taylor's response and allowing himself a moment's thought- most likely to carry out the necessary mental calculations-, before yelling, "500 Bernards, _do it now_!"

Straining my eyes to look back at the area where the tunnel had been- we were rapidly climbing, but I could still just about see the tunnel if I concentrated-, I noticed a brief burst of light from the tunnel, and then it vanished, marking what I hoped was the end of that particular problem-

My private hopes were cut off when something struck us in the side; for a moment, I thought that the bus had just bumped into a plane or been hit by a stray shot from below, but then I noticed one of the stingray-things flying alongside us at close range, and was left with a renewed sense of panic.

"Doctor, it's coming right for us!" Nathan yelled as the creature charged towards us again; it looked like its fellows were being kept occupied by the military forces gathered around the tunnel entrance- probably that 'UNIT' organisation the Doctor had mentioned-, but one of those things was dangerous enough as far as I was concerned.

As it charged towards the bus again, I barely registered the terrified voices behind me as I held onto one of the support bars and stared anxiously at the approaching monster before the Doctor swung the bus around, spinning it on its axis to strike the stingray with such force that it was sent spinning away into the darkness, screeching for a few moments before a large gun in front of the tunnel noticed it and destroyed it, leaving the bus alone in the sky.

"Did I say I hated you?" Christina asked, turning to look at the Doctor with a smile on her face that was definitely different from anything she'd directed at the Doctor before. "I was lying."

The Doctor didn't have time to react to that statement before Christina had grabbed his jacket and pulled him towards her, giving him a surprising kiss that prompted some amused laughs from the other passengers- including a surprising cheer from Carmen- before she pulled away, leaving the Doctor looking at her with a slightly stunned expression before he turned back to the matter that had originally occupied his attention.

"Do not stand forward at this point," my strange friend said, nodding briefly at Christina's current position before he began to address the other passengers. "Ladies and gentlemen, you have reached your final destination. Welcome home, the mighty 200!"

"Uh... what about... them?" Nathan asked, indicating the Tritovores as they sat in silence near the front of the bus, staring at the sight before us with what was probably awe if bug-expressions weren't so hard to figure out; the rest of the passengers seemed to have tentatively accepted their presence among us after the Doctor, Christina and I had vouched for them, but I wasn't about to hope that everyone present when we landed would have the same reaction after past experience with non-humans and their concerns about how others would react to them.

"Uh..." I said, quickly scanning the bus for a solution before I seized on the most obvious option and grabbed the Doctor's long coat, draping it over the head of one of the Tritovores before I shrugged off my jacket and handed it to the other one.

"Just keep those over your heads when we land until we can get you somewhere secure, please?" I asked, hoping that their translation devices would help them understand how sorry I was about having to treat them like this.

Still, if the Doctor trusted this 'UNIT' group, all we'd need to do once we landed should be simple enough; UNIT could keep the Tritovores somewhere safe until we could get back to the TARDIS, and then the Doctor and I could take them back to their world...

Actually, that raised a point I was only just starting to consider; judging by Christina's obvious... _interest_... in the Doctor, would she want to come with us?

And, more importantly, would _the Doctor_ want her to come with us?

I hated to sound so selfish- if the Doctor wanted other company, it wasn't my place to judge who he spent time with-, but I _really_ didn't know how to feel about that...


	10. The Prophecy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a bonus, I include a SLIGHT hint at plans for a future plot; without giving anything more specific away, I'll just say that Bella's going to meet some old companions and deal with a loose end from a novel adventure in a future plot...

As the bus came to a halt on the ground in front of the tunnel- the initial jolt of landing was slightly rough, but considering how difficult the departure had been that was a definite improvement-, I had to remind myself not to feel _too_ satisfied at the applause we received from the various UNIT soldiers gathered around the entrance; appreciation was nice, but in the end it wasn't like I'd done that much to contribute to our return to Earth...

Glancing back at the rest of the bus, the Doctor gave me a brief nod of approval when he noticed the Tritovores' currently-concealed state before he aimed the sonic screwdriver at the bus doors, opening the vehicle that had been our shelter on San Helios, our assembled passengers exchanging smiles and professions of gratitude with each other as they walked past the Doctor, Christina and I and headed out onto the streets.

"Welcome back, everyone," a young man in a military uniform said, walking over to stand close to the bus as he waved us all away from the vehicle, some of his colleagues waving what looked like Geiger counters over the passengers. "If you could step away from the bus, just to be safe, fast as you can, thank you - it's standard procedure, we just need to screen you, then you will all be taken for debriefing..."

"I don't count, and they're with me," the Doctor said, pulling out the psychic paper and showing it to the nearest UNIT guard as he indicated the Tritovores and me, the guard glancing at the paper before giving the Doctor a confirming nod and waving the four of us away from the bus.

"Doctor-!" Christina began, before the soldier lead her away to be scanned along with the others, leaving the four of us to walk along the tarmac towards a dark-skinned woman in a black uniform who was all but pushed aside by an older man with a round face and short greying hair in a long white coat underneath a shorter black military jacket, round glasses, and grey scarf.

"Doctor!" the man said, grinning broadly at the sight of my friend.

"You must be Malcolm!" the Doctor said, smiling gratefully back at the other man, the Tritovores and I standing slightly behind him as he looked at the other two people.

"I love you!" Malcolm said, still grinning enthusiastically as he suddenly hugged the Time Lord, before pulling back to address the Doctor more directly. "I love you. Oh, I love you. I. Love. You."

"To your station, Doctor Taylor," the woman who I presumed had been in charge of the operation said, looking at the other man with a slightly exasperated yet warm smile.

"Yes, ma'am," Malcolm replied, nodding slightly breathlessly at her before he walked away, pausing only briefly to adjust his glasses before he turned back to look at the Doctor one last time. "I love you."

As he ran off back to the van after he and the Doctor had exchanged congratulatory points with each other, the woman turned to look at the Doctor, smiling warmly at the Time Lord.

"Doctor," she said, raising her arm after only a brief glance at me as I stood alongside the Tritovores behind him, "I salute you, whether you like it or not."

"We just did what we could..." I said, suddenly feeling embarrassed even if I wasn't the one receiving the salute.

"Which is why you all deserve it," the woman said, looking over at me with a slight smile. "You'd be the latest companion, I take it?"

"Bella Swan," I responded, briefly noting the implications of that last comment before I shook it off; if the Doctor was as old as he implied at times, it was only natural he'd have travelled with people before now. For a moment, I thought I saw a faint flicker of recognition in the older woman's eyes as she looked at me, but then it passed as she re-focused her attention on the Doctor, and I dismissed it as nothing by my imagination.

"Now," she asked the Doctor, "I take it we're safe from those things?"

"They'll start again, generate a new doorway; not their fault, it's a natural life-cycle," the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he spoke (Not that I couldn't see his point; unlike the Cullens and other vampires, who had the ability to make a choice, the swarm were just animals when you got down to it). "But I'll see if I can nudge the wormholes on to uninhabited planets; right bit of equipment should allow me to shift their bio-rhythms a bit, divert the wormholes away from anything with the right amount of sentient mental energy on it to indicate that the planet's inhabited. Closer to home though, Captain, those two lads..."

As the Doctor turned his head slightly, I followed his gaze to note that he was indicating where Nathan and Barclay were currently being scanned by the other soldiers.

"Very good in a crisis," the Doctor continued, walking around to stand beside the captain as he continued to speak. "Nathan needs a job, Barclay's good with engines, you could do a lot worse. Privates Nathan and Barclay, UNIT's finest?"

"I'll see what I can do," the captain said (Somehow, I had a feeling she'd do more than that; from the way that Malcolm had talked about the Doctor during the initial phone call, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that advice from the Doctor was advice from God as far as UNIT were concerned).

"And I've got something for you..." the captain added, smiling as she indicated a truck a short distance away from us, the back cover being raised to reveal a familiar blue box, its windows glowing as it sat and waited for its crew to return.

"Oh, better than a bus, any day!" the Doctor said, grinning enthusiastically as he hurried over to the TARDIS as it was lowered back onto the ground, beckoning the Tritovores over to him as he quickly opened the door to wave them inside.

"Natives?" the captain asked, looking at the small creatures with a brief smile as the Doctor grabbed our coats off the Tritovores as they passed by him, sounds of what I assumed were awe at the size of the interior clearly audible before the Doctor shut the door.

"Just visitors, actually; I said I'd get them home when those things attacked their ship, and they gave us access to a few bits and bobs to get us back to Earth," the Doctor explained as he shrugged on his coat and tossed mine back to me. "Don't worry about where you picked the old girl up, by the way; she doesn't mind."

I tried not to consider the implications of the royal family not minding about the Doctor leaving the TARDIS in the gardens of Buckingham Palace; I was definitely starting to wonder where my strange new friend _didn't_ have contacts...

"Now," the captain continued, walking forward in a nonchalant manner as she looked at the Doctor, "I've got three dead alien stingrays to clear up; I don't suppose you want to help with the paperwork?"

"Not a chance!" the Doctor replied with a broad grin.

"Until we meet again, Doctor," the captain said, nodding at him in a manner that made it clear she'd expected that response, shaking his hand warmly.

"I hope so," the Doctor replied, smiling back at her.

"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Swan," the captain said, turning to me and shaking my hand, leaving me standing in silence for a moment as I looked uncertainly after the woman- something about the way she said that felt like she meant something else beyond the obvious-, but then Christina ran past me and my attention was drawn back to her as she stood in front of the TARDIS, smiling eagerly at the Doctor.

"Little blue box; just like you said!" Christina said, grinning at him as though they were simply picking up a conversation that I'd missed earlier. "Right then; off we go! Come on, Doctor; show me the stars!"

I had no idea how I should feel about that statement.

It wasn't like I had any say in what the Doctor did- the TARDIS was his ship and I was just a passenger, after all-, and I could probably _learn_ to get along with Christina, but I just didn't find the idea of having to spend time with her that appealing...

"Nope," the Doctor said, looking firmly at Christina.

Relief and confusion warred within me to determine how I should best react to that statement; as much as I was glad to know that Christina wouldn't be joining us- I didn't want anything more from the Doctor other than friendship, but I was just getting comfortable with the dynamic we'd developed in the TARDIS so far; adding in a third person would have felt strange-, the Doctor's dismissal of her did seem a bit abrupt...

"What?" Christina asked, looking at the Doctor in confusion.

"I said no," the Doctor repeated.

"But I saved your life," Christina said, looking at him in confusion. "And you saved mine."

"So?" the Doctor replied, his expression giving nothing away.

"We're surrounded by police," Christina continued, glancing anxiously at the people around us. "I'll go to prison."

"Yep," the Doctor said, taking a deep breath as he acknowledged Christina's assessment of our surroundings (A part of me wasn't sure what to think of the Doctor's abrupt dismissal of that statement, but I quickly amended that thought; given that Christina had already revealed why she'd be arrested, it wasn't like she wanted to escape to avoid unjust punishment or anything like that).

"But you were right," Christina said, looking urgently at him. "It's not about the money; I only steal things for the adventure, and today, with you... I want more days like this. I want _every_ day to be like this. You saw it yourself; we made the perfect team..."

"We were a good team for _this_ incident; that doesn't mean we're a good match on a more regular basis," the Doctor said, shaking his head firmly. "For one thing, I don't just take people around the universe with me because they saved my life, and for another, what you've just said makes it clear you'd be joining me for the wrong reasons; I'm not going to take anyone around the universe for the adrenaline rush. Given your past behaviour- to say nothing of what you just did up there-, you're too used to things going your way; might have been interesting under other circumstances, but as it is, I'm fine with who I have now, and your presence on board isn't what we're looking for."

Before the now-dejected-looking Christina could say anything else to respond to the Doctor's last statement, a slightly overweight man in a suit who was probably a police detective walked up to us, along with a couple of uniformed officers who quickly took up position around Christina.

"Lady Christina di Souza," the man said, looking at her in obvious satisfaction as his men placed handcuffs on Christina's wrists, "I have waited a long time to say this; I am arresting you on suspicion of theft, you do not have to say anything, etcetera, etcetera..."

With that, Christina was led away by the uniformed officers after she gave us a last pleading glance, leaving the Doctor and I to silently watch as she was lead away towards a police car while we just stood beside the TARDIS.

"Uh... what she just did?" I asked, looking curiously at the Doctor, feeling that something else needed to be said about what had just happened.

"She kissed me," the Doctor said simply. "She's probably used to getting men to do anything she wants after she's had a good snog with them- play on the emotions, get the hormones riled up, things like that-; personally, I found it nice, but I'm not going to travel with someone when I'm fairly sure they're going to try and use me after what happened the _last_ time I invited someone like that along..."

"What happened?" I asked uncertainly.

"Long story for another time," the Doctor replied, shaking his head as he looked back at me, the stare making it clear that I wasn't to bring up that particular issue again unless he did. "The point is, I take people who will appreciate the wonders of the universe, but, from what I've seen, Christina would just appreciate the danger; this was always about the thrill for her, rather than the desire to help. She nearly got herself killed back on San Helios because she leapt into action to do things her way without checking to see if it would be safe; I'm all for my friends showing initiative, but you can't just go diving into action when you're facing something this unfamiliar, you know?"

For a moment, as he looked after Christina, toying with the sonic screwdriver, I wondered if the Doctor was still thinking about helping her, but then he looked back at me and shook his head, simply watching as Christina was forced into the car.

"You didn't... want to help her get away?" I asked, looking slightly uncertainly at the Doctor. "I mean, she _did_ help us..."

"Thought about it," the Doctor admitted with a shrug, "but what would it have accomplished? She'd be free with nobody to go to and nothing to fall back on but her old skills, except that I'd have made her aware of a whole new potential market; sometimes, you've got to tell people 'no' to help them move on."

For a moment, I was reminded of Edward- breaking my heart as he dismissed everything that we were-, but I pushed that aside; I wasn't that girl any more, and this wasn't the time to dwell on that part of my past.

"So, what'll happen to her?" I asked.

"Well, she should have a chance," the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he looked at the car where Christina now waited. "She's not a bad person herself- doesn't sound like she killed anyone to get anything she stole, after all-, and with the rest of our little team to serve as character witnesses, I think she'll do all right when things come to trial; maybe the reminder of how she was a hero here'll help her think about doing something that benefits others rather than herself..."

He looked over at me with a surprising smile. "By the way, thanks."

"For what?" I asked.

"For being here to remind me that I need to think at times," the Doctor said.

I wasn't sure what that meant, so decided not to worry about it; if he thought that I was helping him, I wasn't going to argue with that.

"Doctor?" Carmen's voice suddenly said, prompting the two of us to turn around and look at the older woman as she stood on the street opposite us, a solemn expression on her face as she stared at my friend. "You take care now."

"And you!" the Doctor replied with a broad smile. "Chops and gravy, lovely!"

"No, but you be careful," Carmen said, her tone strangely grim as though something was speaking through her rather than her speaking herself. "Because your song is ending, sir."

"What do you mean?" the Doctor said, his expression suddenly grimmer than it had been.

"It is returning," Carmen said, staring intently at him. "It is returning through the dark. And then, Doctor... oh, but then... he will knock four times."

With that, she and Lou walked away, an apologetic expression on Carmen's face as she left, leaving the Doctor and I to exchange uncertain glances with each other.

"Any ideas?" I asked.

"Not a lot," the Doctor said, shaking his head in what I could only interpret as frustrated contemplation, before he sighed and shrugged. "Well, you know prophecies; tricky things that it's not worth putting your faith in, in my view. Come on then; time for us to be off."

"I'm all for _that_ ," I said, turning back to look at the TARDIS, thoughts of prophecies forgotten until a more immediate matter prompted me to look anxiously back at the Doctor. "Uh... shouldn't we be worried about the bus?"

"Oh, no need; without the ship to power them, the clamps'll run down sooner rather than later, and there's no way anyone on Earth would have access to the power supply needed to charge them up properly," the Doctor said, shrugging nonchalantly as he opened the door to the TARDIS. "Anyway, let's be off, shall we; once the Tritovores have been dropped off, any preference for our next destination?"

"Well... some time in the past would be nice; we've been going _forward_ a lot lately..." I said; after my old interest in historical literature, maybe it was time to indulge myself.

"Anywhere in particular?" the Doctor asked.

"Surprise me," I said, smiling at him as we walked back into the police box that was rapidly becoming a home I'd never imagined could exist after the Cullens had left me.

Carmen's prophecy might be an issue, but it wasn't one I was going to worry about any time soon; if anyone could defy prophecy, I had a feeling that it was the Doctor.

Right now, our only priority was to get the Tritovores home, and then we were going off to somewhere in Earth's past; after that, as far as I was concerned, we could just take everything as it came.


End file.
